[danans]

> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.

The anti-immigrant politicians can't punish the employers because they would be punishing their own donors.

If that sounds like a contradiction, consider that undocumented/illegal immigrants are effectively pawns who have no political power in the system, and the contradiction disappears entirely.

[hollerith]

How does that make the contradiction disappear? It doesn't.

The resolution to the contradiction is that few candidates to Federal office are opposed to illegal immigration, and those that have opposed illegal immigration have mostly gotten away with merely saying they are opposed while not doing very much to stop illegal immigration.

[JambalayaJimbo]

Being anti-illegal immigration is a very popular political position.

[hulitu]

Because it makes them look like they care for the people who elected them ("the imigrants make crimes/are taking jobs" narative). In reality the politicians only care about the biggest bider.

[hollerith]

In some states it is, but state-level elected officials have only weak levers with which to influence the rate of illegal immigration.

I don't know much about the topic, but conservative commentator Ann Coulter complained that although he certain got votes by talking about it, Trump didn't do much against illegal immigration and probably doesn't really want to do much about it.

[frmersdog]

Because they never actually intend to, in any meaningful way. Trump is the wildcard; he was the first to actually do it, and the result was a lot of people complaining about rising construction costs and a shrinking labor pool. The actual goal for these donors and politicians is to keep a steady influx of exploitable labor to serve as the poorly-compensated, mistreated underclass that most Americans would riot rather than let themselves become; enough so that they always have something to run on, but not so many that they actually have to take action (e.g., when even liberals or progressives start having an issue with it). Same thing with Democrats and abortion.

The "interesting" (in Chinese proverbial terms) part is that we're living in times where a certain charlatan's actions have lead to the big red button actually being pushed on both matters. Whoever wins tonight, it certainly looks like we're about to test if each respective development has any bearing on polls, or if parties can just run on anti-immigration/pro-choice vibes ad nauseum, regardless of what's actually happened wrt each policy over the past (few) decade(s).