America does not have an immigration crisis. America has a show business problem. What would we expect from a place that put a well known former television game show host in charge of the operation?
The plot is always the same. Every year, we spend staggering sums staging a lavish outdoor production in which ICE and the Border Patrol chase migrants across deserts, rivers, and Home Depot parking lots.
Migrants risk dehydration, heatstroke, drowning, and Texas. Enforcement agencies deploy drones, walls, sensors, and tactical camouflage cargo pants.
And the corporations, whose payrolls act as the real welcome mat, remain untouched, unsullied, and mysteriously shocked that undocumented workers keep appearing in their places of business. The members of management sit comfortably in air-conditioned boardrooms asking if anyone would like another olive in their martini before a round of golf.
We taxpayers pay for all of it.
Here’s an idea. If employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers were fined hard enough to induce actual pain, the rest of the system would collapse faster than a college kid’s tech startup built on loans from middle class parents.
No jobs, no magnet. No magnet, no stampede. No stampede, no need for a trillion-dollar enforcement cosplay theatre operation around the country. .
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That would require punishing the people that should be punished.
Take a typical American multi-national corporation. Call it Ameri-Mart.
Ameri-Mart employs tens of thousands of undocumented workers across warehouses, farms, kitchens, and factories.
These workers receive part-time low wages, no benefits, and the invaluable perk of living in constant fear.
Ameri-Mart, meanwhile, enjoys soaring profits, glowing investor calls, and a CEO who insists he “supports immigration reform” while cashing a bonus large enough to fund nationwide elementary school breakfast.
When ICE eventually raids one of Ameri-Mart’s facilities, the executive response is pure silent movie theater.
Eyes widen. Hands fly to chests. “Undocumented workers? Here? I’m shocked! Shocked I say. We had no idea.” says the VP of Human Resources who acts like they have no access to Google.
E-Verify, it turns out, is something they assumed Legal was handling, and Legal assumed someone had handled it.
The penalties? A fine so small it barely interrupts lunch. A cost of doing business. A corporate tip jar contribution. The equivalent of fining the CEO for parking in a handicap spot.
Now imagine a different universe.
One where fines run into the hundreds of thousands per illegal hire. One where executives lose bonuses, stock options, yachts, and perhaps access to Napa Valley vineyards. One where the phrase “we didn’t know” is met with public ridicule, subpoenas, and develops a sudden fucking interest in corporate accountability.
In that universe, the jobs dry up overnight. And without jobs, migrants stop coming. Not because of walls, drones, or men on horseback, but because the economic incentive evaporates. Borders enforced by math instead of muscle.
Naturally, this universe is unacceptable. It’s un-American, as in bad for business.
Instead, we maintain the enforcement circus.
Border Patrol agents patrol fencing with the effectiveness of the cops from those Police Academy movies. Billions are poured into fences that power saws and ten-foot ladders could breach, sensors that humans learned to spot and avoid, and vehicles that consume lots of fuel because they’re sponsored by Exxon.
ICE has expanded into a big government theme park, where enforcement becomes open-ended and cruelty is the mission statement.
Families are separated. Communities disrupted. Everyone involved assures us this is regrettable but necessary. Necessary, that is, for preserving a system where corporations keep their labor cheap and their hands clean.
Meanwhile, those same corporations lobby aggressively for “temporary worker programs,” which are temporary in the same way tax cuts for the wealthy are temporary.
The arrangement is perfect. Big Business gets low-wage labor. Big Government gets ever-expanding budgets. Politicians get talking points. Taxpayers get fleeced. Migrants get blamed. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Fine the employers properly and the whole thing falls apart.
Companies would be forced to raise wages, train workers, innovate jobs, or experience the previously theoretical concept of consequences.
Executives might even have to cancel a yacht upgrade or not buy a fourth vacation house.
Just picture it.
CEOs in orange jumpsuits discovering the color clashes horribly with spray tans. Boardrooms filled with the anguished cry of “But my shareholders!”
ICE offices converted into affordable housing. Border agents are reassigned to jobs that involve protecting actual borders instead of roaming the country hundreds or thousands of miles from the border.
This has never been about security. It’s about preserving a lucrative ecosystem of exploitation where desperation is punished and profit is protected. The truth would finally be impossible to ignore.
But let us continue, by all means, to chase migrants forever while ignoring the help-wanted signs that summon them. Let’s fund the theater and save the sponsors. Let’s pretend all this is complicated.
Or, here’s a radical thought.
Slap the hand that feeds the problem and watch the rest of the machine evaporate.
But what do I know? I’m not a CEO with a lobbyist or a congressman supplying me with fucking plausible deniability.
Any resemblance to real corporations is purely intentional.
Hey! You’ve read to the end. Thanks for that.
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