[dboreham]

The whole employment without papers thing is a bit of a mystery to me because: I am an employer. I was also an immigrant. Based on being those two things I can't imagine how you get a job without the legal basis to have one[1]. And yet, very large numbers of people do. I'm guessing there's a whole big story to how this works, but surely it has to depend on the government at least turning a blind eye somewhere.

[1]As a non-citizen I had a driver's licence that indicated my immigration status. I didn't have a US passport. I couldn't buy a gun legally nor could I vote. As an employer we are required to verify immigration status for anyone to whom we make a job offer, a task that our HR people take very seriously.

[quxbar]

You can buy a fake social in Queens for $50. It's a deliberately flawed system because fixing it would utterly decimate the pool of cheap labor for the service sector.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/if-youre-a-good-work...

[hannasanarion]

The system is designed to keep illegal immigrants here, but keep them in constant fear.

The raid on Koch Foods that resulted in the arrest of 680 immigrant workers happened only after those workers attempted to unionize, the call to ICE almost certainly came from management, and the people replacing them at those jobs definitely know what the stakes of worker organization are now.

[wtf_is_up]

Non-citizen labor is cheap. Milton Friedman explained this decades ago. "Illegal Immigration only helps when its Illegal" [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/C52TlPCVDio

[morpheuskafka]

It usually involves fake/stolen documents, with the employer either negligently or intentionally turns a blind eye to, and that's the employer's defense if raided.

[etcet]

A friend who works in the restaurant industry says all the back staff have a social security card. But it's one that they all share.