First off, it isn't the employers job to enforce the law. If Person X can do the job, then any employer should be free to consider hiring him. It should be up to the police to render Person X unable to do the job (i.e. put him in jail or kick him out of the country) if he's illegal.
Second, I think the prime incentive for immigrating illegally is the promise of free goods and services provided on the American taxpayers dime. This can be anything from free medical care to foodstamps to clean streets to 1st world education for the kids. Eliminate that and it becomes a lot less appealing to jumpt he border.
The employer is obligated to comply with the law. Also, they have an ethical and moral obligation not to privatize profits and socialize costs by dumping illegals on the local medical system and burdening the local school system with the kids of illegals.
I guess I have a higher opinion of illegal aliens than you do, as I think the primary draw is gainful employment. Thing is, in the USA, any low-skilled worker is a net drain on the economy and tax receipts. They just don't produce enough to counteract the taxpayer-funded bennies they get.
Illegals often present false SS cards when obtaining a new job. The employer still pays into SS, it just winds up going to a complete stranger.
If the false SS card has a real citizen's SSN, the employer, after receiving notice from the IRS and/or SSA that there is a discrepancy, is aiding fraud and identity theft.
If the false SS card has an entirely bogus number, this is also flagged after a bit and the employer is notified by IRS or SSA. Employers who do nothing are as guilty as the illegal aliens. Worse, they are moral cripples who burden their neighbors with the costs of health care and schooling.
Which tells me their gripe isn't that illegals break the law in the process of coming here, their gripe is that they come here at all.
There are other reasons pertaining to taxation & economics, fairness, culture, and sovereignty to consider
Any low-skilled immigrant, legal or otherwise, is a net drain. Citizens will have to be taxed more to support them and those tax dollars are dollars that won't be spent as their previous owners saw best. This retards economic growth and also retards innovation, as there is no incentive to replace plentiful low-skilled workers with new processes & machinery.
Mass immigration (legal or otherwise) of low-skilled labor into the USA screws over low-skilled citizens, driving their wages down. Folks gotta remember that the USA is not Lake Woebegone, where all citizens are above average. Some folks are just born with less intelligence, half having less than then median intelligence for the population. Do we tell our fellow citizens, "*expletive deleted*ck off and die? I'll get cheaper labor from overseas?" Do we have any affection for fellow (lower-skilled) citizens for the mere fact that they are
fellow citizens, to the point where we'd
not actively try to make their lives worse by dumping millions of low-skilled immigrants into the labor force? I'm not a big fan of welfare programs, but I am not such a heel that I'd actively try to place impediments in people's way or kick them while they are down.
The great mass of immigrants (legal & otherwise) coming to the USA come from bass-ackward cultures where corruption and despotism is the norm. It took millenia for Western Civilization to alloy democracy, republicanism, and individual sovereignty into a system that is stable, respects individuals, and is not just another self-serving syndicate. Immigrants from bass-ackward countries carry this cultural baggage with them, as can be seen in the neighborhoods with large numbers of them. Those that do "assimilate," mostly assimilate to the dysfunctional black underclass culture of unwed motherhood, drug use, crime, etc. (1st gen immigrants, to their credit, have lower rates of the former. Their kids & grandkids begin the spiral down.) To put it plainly, a massive influx of an illiterate, 18th-century (skills/outlook) labor force is not something good for our culture & polity.
A rational & sovereign nation crafts immigration policy for its benefit, not the benefit of the immigrants. "Who do
we want to let in?" is the pertinent question, not "Who wants to get in?" If it was the latter, we could expect 3-5 billion immigrants, as there are roughly 5 billion people on Earth less well-off than your average Mexican, great numbers of whom make the trek north. To that end, the citizenry's desires are clear: they want no mass immigration of illiterate, "ready for the 18th Century" workers into our 21st Century country.
