by James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.

The U.S. economy includes a significant number of unlawfully present workers who are undocumented and unaccounted for. Research by the Government Account­ability Office (GAO) indicates an alarming degree of collaboration on the part of employers in hiring illegal workers.[1] This excessive acceptance of a shadow work­force encourages illegal border crossings, encourages other companies to break the law, and forces states and local communities to subsidize cheap, illegal labor by bearing social costs such as uncompensated emergency room care, education, and social services.

Both the House and the Senate have proposed leg­islation for strengthening workplace enforcement. Both envision using the Basic Pilot program, created in 1996 under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, as a principal tool for denying unlawfully present workers employment.[2] This approach fails on a three counts:

It is unlikely that Basic Pilot will prove to be an effective tool;
The implementation of the program will place excessive and unnecessary burdens on the U.S. economy; and
There are practical and more effective means to enhance workplace enforcement.
I propose an enforcement strategy that could be implemented without creating more government and a huge and expensive information technology program. This strategy could be implemented by revising the U.S. tax code to facilitate cooperation between federal agencies in enforcing the law. I pro­pose amending the tax code in a way that will pro­tect privacy rights and still allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with the cooperation of the Social Security Administration (SSA) and Inter­nal Revenue Service (IRS), to find those large employers who intentionally violate the law by hir­ing illegal workers and giving the government incorrect information.