The United States has a long-standing illegal employer problem.
Entire industries are structured around employing large numbers of workers who are not authorized to work in this country, and criminal employers have pushed to maintain that status quo.
Illegal employers are part of what consumer advocate Ralph Nader has for over half a century identified to be a corporate crime wave.
That’s according to a report – Shift focus to corporate crime: It’s time to crack down on illegal corporate employer by Christopher Shaw in the February/March 2026 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen.
Over twenty years ago, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele stated that “for corporate America, employing illegal aliens at wages so low few citizens could afford to take the jobs is great for profits and stockholders.”
“That’s why the payrolls of so many businesses – meat-packers, poultry processors, landscape firms, construction companies, office-cleaning firms, and corner convenience stores, among others – are jammed with illegals. And companies are rarely, if ever, punished for it.”
The likelihood of illegal employers facing legal consequences has remained similarly low over the past two decades.
While immigration enforcement in workplaces occurred prior to 1986, that was the year when it first became unlawful for employers to knowingly hire unauthorized workers. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 directed employers to establish that job applicants are authorized to work lawfully in the United States.
Although the 1986 immigration act requires businesses to verify the employment eligibility of applicants, it is widely recognized that the use of forged documents has been commonplace.
Attorneys at the employment law firm Ogletree Deakins have reported that “most illegal workers have no problem obtaining falsified documents.”
This document fraud has undermined the effectiveness of the 1986 law’s In 1994, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, which was chaired by Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), noted that “employers who hire illegal aliens tend to violate other labor standards and vice versa.”
Labor unions lobbied for the inclusion of employer sanctions in the 1986 immigration act.
The AFL-CIO anticipated that the law would “reduce the flow of illegal immigration that has depressed wages in many parts of the United States, added to unemployment, and allowed employers to exploit workers subject to deportation if reported to immigration officials. The new law seeks to accomplish this by imposing penalties on employers who hire illegal aliens.”
Althea T. L. Simmons, the NAACP’s chief lobbyist in Washington, D.C., also backed this reform, explaining that “the NAACP strongly supports employer sanctions. Our branches across the country, particularly in large cities, report that
“If you are trying to deter unlawful immigration it seems like you would focus on employers,” says Houston criminal defense attorney Ryan McConnell. “It’s a lot more effective to go after an employer than to send agents driving around the streets trying to pick off people one by one.”
The Economic Policy Institute points out that enforcement actions by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division not only protect labor rights, they serve to “level the playing field for employers, so that violators who underpay workers or engage in other exploitative or illegal behavior to cut labor costs do not gain a competitive advantage over law-abiding employers.”
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