Immigration raids often start with tips from disgruntled employees

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: Business Journals

It often starts with a disgruntled current or former employee calling a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office tip line or a worker who has gotten into legal trouble sharing information on an employer.

The result can be dozens of armed MCSO deputies raiding a business, shutting it down for hours and arresting suspected undocumented workers.

A 2007 state law, designed to suspend or the revoke business licenses of employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers, has led to many employee arrests, but few bosses or businesses have been charged.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has raided 22 Phoenix-area businesses suspected of hiring illegal immigrants since 2008. Those resulted in 310 arrests on immigration, fake identification and identify theft charges.



Read more: http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2009/08/31/daily51.html

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Brownshirts come in diferent flavors not only right wing loonies

[Hello_Kitty]

1. Not a fan of Arpaio at all and the raids are abusive and target the wrong people. However,

I do not support employers hiring undocumented people. And I call bullshit on them "not knowing" the workers are illegal. I live here in Phoenix and there are numerous contractors and business owners who gladly take advantage of a steady supply of workers who are obedient, will work cheap, and don't complain. They know the workers aren't legal and don't care. They are a big part of the problem and far too many so-called "progressives" protect them.

[izquierdista]

2. Neither do their customers

Nobody ever asks why the contractor is able to bid a job so low.

[Igel]

3. Yes, many, if not most, know that they're hiring illegal immigrants.

The problem is that this isn't enough.

I don't think you should penalize employers who comply with the documentation requires of current law and honestly don't know that Jose Menendez or Ivan Petrov is here illegally. I've been in charge of checking IDs to comply with the (then) INS requirements and I honestly had no idea if the IDs I was given were valid. For example, the SS cards didn't look like mine--then again, neither does my wife's, and if the other office staffer had been given that job she'd have said mine didn't look like *hers*.

Then there's the problem of compelling self-incrimination. The employer says, "We didn't know"--even if he's perjuring himself, nonetheless the prosecutor gets to prove it. Go on--prove that the employer knew that "Helen Witherspoon", with her Serbian accent, was here illegally. And use evidence that will stand up in court.

When a young Mexican woman that worked where I worked for a while, who only spoke Spanish, said that she was here legally and her name was "Gertrude" (something or other--Evans? Iverson? dunno) I couldn't say, "Ah, but you speak no English, how can you be a citizen, I will verify that Arkansas driver's license with their DMV." That would be discrimination against her--suspecting that because of her language skills or skin color or customs that she wasn't really "American," and subjecting her to additional scrutiny on the basis of language and skin melanin content. Sometimes the law is an ass. Then again, so was my employer--she liked the idea of hiring young immigrant women because otherwise, as she put it, "The only choice they'd have left is to be prostitutes." (And, no, she wasn't repub--she was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.)