[Unselect6889]

Interesting! That reminds me of a similar arrangement I dealt with in Fast Food.

Back in 2008 I was working at a Wendy's where the majority of the staff would routinely "resubmit" their applications. I don't know the intricacies of the process, but the way it was explained to me was roughly something like this:

1) Illegal fills out application using a fake SSN

2) (Physical) Paperwork gets reviewed by manager, to make sure everything is filled out. Wait on sending it until they are bugged by corporate to submit the "new" employee applications

3) Send it to corporate

4) Corporate goes through a stack of however many "new" employee applications they have received across the region. Let's assume it's 10,000+

5) After corporate reviews the "new" employee applications, they gather up the names and SSNs, which are sent off to some sort of verification system

6) An error is thrown out and sent back to corporate saying that the name and address doesn't match the SSN provided. Corporate waits to send this information for a few days/weeks, depending on how many they are processing at a given time

7) The store receives a rejection notification sometime later

8) Wait about 1 week or so until corporate starts complaining, return to step 1

Some of the guys I was working with had gone through this process for - no joke - at least 2 to 3 years. Since they were continually seen as "new" employees, there was no sort of issue with firing previous employees or anything like that. It also didn't hurt that different information was being provided each time. After all, corporate had no way of claiming that Jose Guzman at 123 fake street, with SSN 123-45-6789 was the same Jose Guzman at 123 fake street, with SSN 987-65-4321, since they didn't want to be accused of racism.

It wasn't so much a problem to be resolved, as it is a "discrepancy" to be "corrected". The only correction needed was to have the "new" employee resubmit their application.

On a side-note, I'm not exactly sure how any of this worked, but it also led to the "new" employees making about $3 per hour. I accidentally left a paycheck out at one point, and one of the Spanish guys saw it and flipped out, yelled to the other guys, and they all started flipping out too. I guess they were under the impression that minimum wage was whatever the managers told them it was? I felt bad for them, in a way, since they were working extremely long days, but they were also not paying any taxes, sleeping on the job, and would flee the country once their home was built back in their home country. Basically, they were treated poorly, but they were also standing to save up about a full decades worth of money by stealing from the country they broke into illegally. I don't really hold any hostility over them doing that, I just don't hold much sympathy either.

[excitom]

You lost me at "stealing from the country they broke into illegally." I see people working hard to try to improve their and their families' lives.

Surely the employer is deducting for income tax, SS tax, and medicare tax from their paychecks, and they will not see an income tax "refund" next April nor will they ever collect SS nor Medicare benefits.

And if the employer is not making these deductions then who is doing the "stealing" exactly?

[imwillofficial]

The people not paying the taxes after committing tax fraud? Also all the corp employees who facilities this fraud.

[lazide]

Wage workers generally have taxes withheld involuntarily, at least unless someone makes them manually override it.

Interestingly, that seems to trigger the taxman to start looking, which is when folks get busted. It’s in some mentioned anecdotes and articles here.

Even more interesting? If they instead just abandon the withheld taxes, no one seems interested in actually fixing the problem.

It would be trivial to mandate employers do realtime submissions of the employment eligibility paperwork for instance, but it’s actually illegal to send it to anyone, or attempt to do anything more with that information (like have a service somewhere that tracks these things and notifies employers of obviously invalid cases like a SSN being used across 5 states for 50 different job applications at different employers at once).

A cynical person would say it’s because as long as the people who need to be paid are getting paid, unskilled labor is cheap and easy to scare/boss around, illegal immigration is not actually a problem, but an opportunity for them.

[1659447091]

Wouldn't it put them in tax exempt bracket if they are making $3/hr? Not an accountant so really not sure about these things, but thought under a certain amount, you don't pay taxes.

[Unselect6889]

I'll try to answer this as clearly and honestly as I can, based off of what I witnessed. I hope it doesn't come off as "snippy" or whatever. I know it's a topic that a lot of people get very passionate about. I don't really have any sort of passion either way, I just know what I've seen.

>You lost me at "stealing from the country they broke into illegally."

Sorry about that, I'll clarify: Illegals do not pay state or federal taxes in exchange for the services they benefit from. The validity of taxes themselves is an issue itself that can be debated, but the refusal to pay taxes at all is a form of theft. There's a general attitude of something roughly like, "The more money I save now, the quicker I can get back home." This means not paying for things, stealing food, etc. You learn to lock your car up and not leave your cellphone laying around real quick.

> I see people working hard to try to improve their and their families' lives.

Irrelevant.

Again, sorry if this sounds snippy, but it's true. We could presume that about literally anyone. It does not justify a cop taking a bribe, or a CEO lying to customers to get ahead. There is no justification for breaking into a country illegally. A good deed after committing a crime makes a criminal both naive and poorer for the effort.

More to the point, in the situation that I was speaking of their actions, in my understanding, nothing to do with "their families' lives". The purpose was to save money, in order to build houses so that they themselves would not need to work for a number of years. The men that I worked with were not married, did not have children, and never mentioned their extended families over the course of the years that I worked with them. You can assume that they may have been sending money to relatives, but there is nothing to support that assertion. Honestly, I strongly doubt that assumption in the way that it's written, based on the behavior that I witnessed on a routine basis.

Consider this, in the image of illegals that you have in your mind: do you see them beating homosexuals in the back because they felt like it? Do you see them driving to work drunk? These are the sorts of things I saw regularly. I did not see anything approaching some valiant hero, "just tryin' to provide for the lil' ones back home". I saw drunk, paranoid, irrationally violent men who were going to do whatever they wanted to while they could get away with it. I had little reason to believe that the men I worked with weren't complete sociopaths, let alone believe that they had any sort of duty to provide for some distant relative.

Are there some that do send money back? Maybe the stupid ones. But if they do, they're going to be "stuck" in America longer than they would otherwise. The illegals that I worked with had zero intention of staying in America for any extended length of time. It was just a way to make money and get out. The "I'm gonna get mine, hope you get yours" type mindset.

>Surely the employer is deducting for income tax, SS tax, and medicare tax from their paychecks, and they will not see an income tax "refund" next April nor will they ever collect SS nor Medicare benefits.

I wasn't privy to reading the details of each of their paychecks, but I would assume that they were paying income tax, SS tax, and medicare. If you're attempting to assert that by paying into those things that they were automatically paying for, that it somehow justified or lessened their crimes, you are mistaken. I pay into medicare. I pay into SSN. I have no expectation of ever receiving access to either service being available by the time I would be eligible to use them. I do not, however, then assume that I am somehow being "stolen" from, or "donating" that money. I pay it because I have no choice in the matter. I have already come to terms with that. I have accepted that neither service could possibly be sustainable for the next several decades. That fact however, does not mean that I have some right or choice to not pay into it.

>And if the employer is not making these deductions then who is doing the "stealing" exactly?

Given the points covered above, again, it is the illegals that are stealing. The company, without question, absolutely knew what was going on. They were complicit, a form of accomplice, sure. But the active process of stealing? That was on the part of the illegals - the company simply capitalized on the "great opportunity" and stood to benefit by working with thieves; birds of a feather and all of that.

Again, I don't really have any hatred for these people. They do it because they can get away with it, and there is very little incentive to stop them from doing it. I simply don't feel much in the way of sympathy when the people taking advantage of the country, are in turn, being taken advantage of by scummy corporations that exist within that country. When criminals work with criminals, should it come as a surprise when one rips off another? No one is going to call the cops over receiving a bad batch of heroin, it's simply the cost of doing business with that sort of person.