The American Spectator

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(Page 3 of 17)

Beverly Gunn br> East Texas Rancher, Military mom /p>

I hear over and over again that it would be impractical to try to deport the 11 million (or is it 30 million?) illegals who are thought to be currently residing in this country. While Mr. Henry does not succumb to this argument and, in fact, argues that we wouldn't have to deport anywhere close to all of them, I think that he, along with most everybody else, is missing an even simpler solution: let the market take care of the illegal immigration issue. After all, isn't the market causing all of these people to enter our country illegally in the first place?

Here's my plan. First, set a bounty of say $100,000, payable by the employer, for each illegal caught in their fields or their factories or their kitchens or wherever. Give everybody a 90 or 180 day grace period in which only warnings will be issued. At the end of that grace period, let the fur start to fly. Set up an 800 number and e-mail address to which concerned citizens could place calls/send e-mails to report violations. In order to encourage participation, allow tipsters to collect half of the bounty themselves while the other half goes to fund the program itself. Better yet, allow the illegals themselves to collect half of the bounty if they were the ones who reported their employer. Of course, they'd be setting themselves up for quick repatriation to their country of origin but they'd be at least $50,000 richer (minus the government costs for getting them and their family back home) for their trouble. How long and hard would they have to work to earn this amount of money under the current system? I imagine that kind of money would go a very long way back home for most people.

p>The beauty of this system is that the employer bears the full cost but the employer can certainly make the decision to opt out of the system entirely by getting rid of all their illegals during the initial grace period then endeavoring to ensure that all future hires are thoroughly vetted for legal status along with the rest of their standard pre-employment screening (drugs, criminal background, educational, previous employment, etc.). And, dovetailing nicely with Mr. Henry’s point in the article, you would only need a relative handful of high profile cases to convince almost everybody to get onboard with the law rather than continuing to flaunt it by hiring illegals who could very well end up costing them significantly more than they are paying today. br> -- Mike Leland br> Belmont, California /p>

The article caused a few facts to come together in my head.

1. Illegal immigrants use fake Social Security cards (and numbers) where they work. Their employers withhold taxes on the income. The funds flow to the state and national governments.

2. Legal residents file income taxes, either quarterly or annually in April. Our forms go to the IRS where our W-2 and 1099 data are compared with data that our employers have sent in for our SSN.

3. Google and others have massive data mining search engines that can find and associate records within huge data repositories. The FBI already has search engines that scour public records, e.g., Lexus/Nexus.

If an illegal alien was using my SSN as a cover, then the IRS would see the withholdings coming from the illegal alien's employer, along with my employer's withholdings. The illegal's name and my SSN would not match what was registered by the Social Security Administration in 1971. I live in Maryland. If my SSN was being used in Arizona, too, shouldn't the IRS wonder why? If I don't include the Arizona W-2 and 1099 data with the Maryland ones, shouldn't that trigger an audit?

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