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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Presumably your coworkers weren't legally working in the US?

Why would them leaving be viewed as a "broken" immigration system? I'd say it's broken if we don't enforce immigration laws, not if we enforce them.

It would be trivial to set up a system to validate the right to work in the US. In fact one already exists - E-Verify. But many groups have resisted the national roll out and penalties if businesses don't comply (similar to how we have sanctuary cities).

The funny part is that in all the other countries I've lived in, this issue never comes up. Sure, there are illegal immigrants, etc, but nobody questions when they are sent home or when businesses are fined for violating immigration law.

I'm not sure why it's such a contentious issue in the US.

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Saw this for the first time as a teenager working in the service industry too. My restaurant was a little mom-and-pop run by a couple who would knowingly violate employment law by hiring undocumented workers for back-of-house roles, and would use the threat of contacting immigration enforcement to coerce them to do further unlawful things when it suited their interest. Often it was in service of unlawful activities like improper waste disposal and dumping.

I have no idea how much they were paid, if it was regularly, or if they benefitted from mandated labor concessions like lunches and breaks.

So odd that we so often label people on one side of this transaction as “illegal” but have no popular words to describe the other.

When wealthy people say they want an unregulated free market - this is what they mean.

People get really mad when I bring what you said up. When I worked in the service industry we had tons of pre E-Verify illegal people working there. Most of them never filed taxes and put the most exceptions possible on their W-4s.

Post E-Verify in my state I noticed we hardly hired anyone illegal. I worked in 3 chain restaurants and it was always the same. Even then the restaurants didn’t care at all if the number was stolen or reused, as long as the SSN or Tax ID number passed the verification.

Why would them leaving be viewed as a "broken" immigration system? I'd say it's broken if we don't enforce immigration laws, not if we enforce them.

It's a broken system that allows them into the US in the first place, then denies them reasonable opportunities to work and settle down, then deports them on a whim.

We need the labor; let them in legally, pay them a fair wage, and allow them to pursue their dreams like any other resident.

There are significant issues with E-Verify's error rate. It is a poor idea to enable the government to unilaterally strip someone of their right to work, particularly given the error rate, when the only recourse is a lengthy kafka-esque process involving multiple government agencies that can drag on for months.

The fact that after decades they still haven't adequately addressed the error rates or the recourse process does not lend confidence that this is something that should be mandated.

It's "broken" in the sense that other parts of the society depend on non-enforcement. Start enforcing it more often and the house of cards starts crumbling.

Benefiting from exploitation =/= dependence, but I would imagine some businesses rely more heavily on this than others.

Really? If we enforced immigration laws strictly then prices for food and household services would rise a little, but the whole economy wouldn't crumble.

There would be chaos in agriculture lasting over a year, in my opinion.

Labor is only 6-7% of the total cost of produce.

> I'd say it's broken if we don't enforce immigration laws, not if we enforce them.

I'd say it's broken if the laws are bad.

What laws are bad? That we allow less people to come and work in the US than there are people willing to do so?

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