Put the CEOs in Handcuffs

If illegal employment is the magnet, stop terrorizing workers and start prosecuting the powerful people offering the jobs…

There’s a simple solution to our “illegal immigration” crisis: put some wealthy white CEOs — who are inviting these often desperate people into the country and hiring them — into prison. Ronald Reagan came up with the idea and put it into law, but no president since him has been willing to enforce it.

As a result, there’s a growing movement in America to defund and close down ICE, fire and prosecute their brutal and murderous thugs, and close their concentration camps.

Fox News found 59 percent of voters across the political spectrum say ICE is “too aggressive,” and nearly two-thirds of voters told Marist the agency “has gone too far.” Support for abolishing ICE outright has doubled since 2018.

While most people in the movement point to the barbarity of their tactics and how they’re now spying on protesters, an even stronger argument for ending the agency is that they’re simply not needed.

There’s an alternative, which will largely stop the flow of undocumented people coming into America in search of economic opportunity, and its already part of American law. It’s just that our politicians refuse to enforce it.

Farmers in Maine this week are nervously waiting for the knock. The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association warned its members that ICE agents are already flying drones over fields and work sites looking for brown-skinned people. In Connecticut this week these masked, bloodthirsty goons have been dragging parents off in front of their kids at the school bus stops, at least 25 people in a single day were sent to concentration camps in Texas or elsewhere.

But have you heard of a single wealthy white farmer, general contractor, or other corporate employer of these “illegals” going to jail?

Of course not, because the show this administration is are putting on isn’t about preventing illegal immigration; it’s purely an effort to terrify people of color — including American citizens — being done by radical white supremacists like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump who find it a source of gleeful entertainment. After all, nobody wears a balaclava to serve a fine on a poultry executive.

As Fortune Magazine noted:

“Trump himself has been accused of employing unauthorized workers at his hotels, golf courses and other businesses.”

The rest of the world is more rational and less racist, it seems. I’ve worked in two countries (Germany and Australia) where I had to get a visa and a work permit to draw a paycheck. In both cases, it wasn’t the government that demanded I fill out the paperwork; it was my employers. Because they didn’t want to be hit with big fines or legal processes for paying an unauthorized foreigner.

Their systems attacked the problem of “illegal immigration” from the money end, something that instantly gets the attention of wealthy employers who want to hang onto their wealth and avoid being tossed in the clink.

America, on the other hand, decided a long time ago that it was easier to go after poor brown people than wealthy white employers, and that sentiment has carried through to today.

After all, undocumented people without papers can’t report wage theft, can’t complain about dangerous working conditions, and can’t sign up for a union. They’re easily abused and exploited, and generally their labor is cheaper than citizens, which is why companies employ them.

The AFL-CIO made exactly that argument in 2000 when then-Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson said:

“Employers often knowingly hire workers who are undocumented, and then when workers seek to improve working conditions, employers manipulate the law to fire or intimidate workers. This subverts the intent of the law and lowers working standards for all workers.

“The law should criminalize employer behavior, not punish workers.”

There’s an amazing history here, including a major role played by Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney, that both emphasize how wrong the ICE approach is and how much more effective and humane a system that focuses on employers like other democracies do would be.

Our first serious attempt to criminalize undocumented immigration was in 1952 when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, better known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It made it a federal crime to “harbor” an undocumented alien.

Wealthy white ranchers and meat processors in Texas, however, rebelled when the law was being debated and paid off enough legislators that the “Texas Proviso” was inserted into the law that explicitly said that employing a person wasn’t legally the same thing as “harboring” them.

That changed, however, in 1986 when Ronald Reagan pushed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 through Congress, which, in addition to granting legal status to about 2.7 million aliens, explicitly criminalized hiring future undocumented people. In his signing statement, Reagan said:

“The employer sanctions program is the keystone and major element. It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here.”

The law was enforced for a few years, peaking at around 10,000 employer audits in 1990, but over the next decade audits fell by 77 percent. Cases where wealthy employers were actually fined dropped by 82 percent; total fines in 1996 were a measly $3.1 million, an amount the employers could just shrug off. Since then, it has fallen off a cliff.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University did and published the research: since 1986, no more than 25 employers have been prosecuted in any single year and in the 2018-2019 12-month period that they examined only seven cases were prosecuted and none of them involved going after a corporation.

During that same year, however, our government prosecuted 86,000 individual people for illegal entry and 35,000 for illegal re-entry. For example, in Mississippi in 2019 ICE agents arrested 680 workers at seven poultry processing plants in the largest workplace raid in a decade. Agents surrounded the buildings to prevent people from leaving, did mass arrests, and left children crying alone in cars in the parking lot.

As the Mississippi Free Press documented at the time:

“Left out of the indictments, though, are charges against personnel at two companies whose executives have given thousands of dollars to top Mississippi officials, and who received public endorsements from former Gov. Phil Bryant prior to the August 2019 raids.

“Those companies, PECO Foods and Koch Foods, represent five of the seven plants that ICE targeted in last year’s raids…that, in turn, poured thousands into the campaign coffers of some of Mississippi’s top federal officials, including [Republican] U.S. Senators Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker.”

Then there’s the Mitt Romney moment of rationality from one of the few sane Republicans left. When the former Massachusetts governor was running for president in 2012, he forcefully argued in a January 23rd debate with President Obama that the key to solving the problem of illegal immigration wasn’t to arrest the brown-skinned people but, instead, to go after their employers.

That would cause the jobs to dry up, Romney argued, and that in turn would lead people who couldn’t find or maintain employment to “self-deport.” After Obama bragged that his administration had “presided over record 396,906 deportations in 2011,” Romney replied simply:

“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. We’re not going to round people up.”

Romney’s idea, however, offended the white supremacists who were increasingly dominating the GOP. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus was quoted by CBS News right after the debate:

“‘Using the word ‘self-deportation’ - I mean, it’s a horrific comment to make,’ the chairman told reporters at the RNC’s annual meeting in Boston, according to an audio recording from Business Insider. ‘It’s not something that has anything to do with our party. But when a candidate makes those comments, obviously it hurts us.’”

Stephen Miller and his racist crowd would emphatically agree, as they delight in the idea of brown-skinned people being on the receiving end of 350-volt shock gloves, their latest nod to raw brutality worthy of the Klan in days of old. Even E-Verify, a good attempt, is still voluntary for most private employers under federal law.

The Trump/Miller mandate is straightforward: Don’t go after the rich white guys who invite “illegals” here; instead, terrorize and humiliate the people who just came here looking for a better life or to escape being murdered.

As Adam Serwer pointed out in The Atlantic in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.” Just watch the DHS press releases, the mugshot montages, and Trump’s gleeful all-caps posts on his Nazi-infested social media site and it’s all vividly clear. This isn’t law enforcement; it’s a show being put on for the very worst of the white supremacists and racists among us. And, tragically, the entire world is watching in horror.

It’s been forty years since Reagan called employer sanctions “the keystone” to solving the undocumented immigration problem, and every time anybody tries to solve that problem the business lobby jumps in and kills it. All while ICE gets tens of billions of dollars to chase and beat up dishwashers.

So, today may be a good day to call your member of Congress and your two Senators (202-224-3121) and let them know we should be arresting rich white employers instead of powerless employees.

And that we need to fix our system from top-to-bottom with legislation producing Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Texas Democrat Veronica Escobar has proposed a great start and gotten modest bipartisan support for her Dignity Act that does just that, and there was a good-faith effort championed by Republican Senator James Lankford that then-candidate Donald Trump ordered killed in 2024 because he wanted this brutality show instead.

We’ve all had enough of this disgusting racism and violence.

And if this piece was useful to you, please share it and subscribe to the Hartmann Report. Independent journalism runs on readers who pass this work along, and this is one story the people who own the poultry plants would very much like you to not think about.

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