Immigration Law and Its Costs for Businesses

Link via Combest, Claire McCaskill writes about illegal immigration in the Kansas City Star. She mentions the raid of a chicken processing plant in Missouri and complains that employers such as this one go unpunished:

Is that fair? No, it is not fair. It’s not fair to American workers. It’s unfair to the businesses that are playing by the rules. It is fundamentally unfair that many businesses are requiring the kind of documentation that assures them they are following the law while other employers are paying cash under the table to pad the bottom line.

This argument doesn’t make sense to me. We have a bad law that is extremely burdensom for businesses and workers to comply with. A few actually manage to comply with it. Therefore, to be fair, we should enforce the bad law more broadly.

It would be fairer not to have the burdensom immigration law in the first place. The current system forces every business to act in place of the U.S. government, investigating employees and enforcing immigration regulations. The time it takes to comply is a huge cost for employers.