Many years ago, I watched a journalistic piece (Morely Safer on 60 Minutes) about undocumented immigrants in Colorado's construction industry. The owner allowed as to the fact that he "probably" had many such people working on his projects because he followed the strict letter of the law that only required him to check the presence of wo…
Many years ago, I watched a journalistic piece (Morely Safer on 60 Minutes) about undocumented immigrants in Colorado's construction industry. The owner allowed as to the fact that he "probably" had many such people working on his projects because he followed the strict letter of the law that only required him to check the presence of work papers of each individual job applicant... but not to see if copies of the same papers were being used by multiple applicants. He allowed that, if he checked the veracity of each applicant's papers, he would probably reject most of the applicants... BUT, that the law did not make it his responsibility to do such a check and he needed the applicants to do the work. He made the point that those applicants showed up every day for work and, through their willingness to work hard and be reliable, they earned every penny that he paid them. To make a point, Safer interviewed the applicant's at that week's induction of new employees and, again, a week after they were on the job. He found that 100% of the possibly-undocumented employees were still on the job, while 75% of the new employees with US birth certificates had already quit. The owner of the construction company pointed out that the new construction during a boom year was only possible because of the reliability of the immigrants.
Many years ago, I watched a journalistic piece (Morely Safer on 60 Minutes) about undocumented immigrants in Colorado's construction industry. The owner allowed as to the fact that he "probably" had many such people working on his projects because he followed the strict letter of the law that only required him to check the presence of work papers of each individual job applicant... but not to see if copies of the same papers were being used by multiple applicants. He allowed that, if he checked the veracity of each applicant's papers, he would probably reject most of the applicants... BUT, that the law did not make it his responsibility to do such a check and he needed the applicants to do the work. He made the point that those applicants showed up every day for work and, through their willingness to work hard and be reliable, they earned every penny that he paid them. To make a point, Safer interviewed the applicant's at that week's induction of new employees and, again, a week after they were on the job. He found that 100% of the possibly-undocumented employees were still on the job, while 75% of the new employees with US birth certificates had already quit. The owner of the construction company pointed out that the new construction during a boom year was only possible because of the reliability of the immigrants.