A Snitch in Time Can Help Deport Nine
Proposing a private enforcement scheme to spur self-deportations
By Ajay Gupta on February 3, 2025
Summary
The Trump administration's drive to remove some of the millions of aliens illegally present in the country will inevitably be limited in scope, underscoring the importance of goading self-deportations for perceptibly reducing these aliens’ numbers by curtailing their employment opportunities. Based in part on Britain’s experience with eradicating child labor in the nineteenth century, the article proposes a scheme of private enforcement for rendering unemployable a large proportion of unauthorized aliens in the United States labor market today. The proposal comprises enacting a punitive tax on all compensation paid for the personal services or labor of such unauthorized aliens and enabling private enforcement of this tax. Implementing that proposal would require only minor amendments to the Internal Revenue Code and the False Claims Act. But together, those amendments would constitute a low-cost way of compelling employers to comply with E-Verify, which, in turn, would prod unauthorized aliens to self-deport. The article spells out and discusses the text for making those legislative changes, which could be adopted in a budget reconciliation bill. Noting that the proposal presented can be developed further to protect domestic wages from legally imported cheaper labor, the article urges deferring any such extensions until there is greater political consensus on curbing legal immigration.
I. Introduction
Some estimates put the number of aliens illegally present in the country at around 22 million, though the actual figure could be higher or lower.1 Notwithstanding its “shock and awe,” a forcible deportation drive is unlikely to make a dent in that vast population. For this, the law against hiring these aliens would have to be strictly enforced. Britain’s experience with child labor in the nineteenth century shows that government enforcement action, constrained by the limitations of budgetary resources and state apparatus, is unlikely to succeed by itself in removing from the labor market large numbers of willing and able workers. Indeed, resting on public enforcement alone could even make things worse by simply pushing unauthorized aliens to seek employment in the less visible sectors of the economy. By comparison, enabling private enforcement should be much more effective. In this article, I propose such a private enforcement scheme for reducing the employment opportunities available to unauthorized aliens. The proposal would impose a punitive tax on all who pay for the personal services or labor of unauthorized aliens and let private citizens sue to collect this tax. The ubiquity of snitches, as compared to the distant possibility of government action, is likely to put the fear of God in employers. Most, if not all, would then willingly embrace E-Verify, a free online tool for verifying a prospective hire’s work-authorization status. The resulting inability to obtain employment should induce large numbers of unauthorized aliens to return home. I point out that giving effect to this proposal would only require minor amendments to the Internal Revenue Code and the False Claims Act, amounting to little more than 650 additional words of statutory text — changes that can be made in a budget reconciliation bill.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Part II emphasizes the importance of prompting self-deportations, given the sparse enforcement of current employer mandates against and sanctions for hiring unauthorized aliens, which are discussed in Part III. Part IV starts by drawing lessons from Britain's nineteenth-century efforts to abolish child labor, applying these insights to develop a private enforcement model for removing unauthorized aliens from the United States labor market today. Part IV begins by extracting lessons from Britain’s nineteenth-century history in ultimately eradicating child labor for developing a private enforcement model aimed at removing unauthorized aliens from the labor market in the United States today. The second half of Part IV fleshes out the contours of that model, proposing a punitive tax on the compensation paid for an unauthorized alien’s services, with private actors allowed to sue for the collection of this tax. Part V discusses the statutory text for enacting this proposal, which is set out in an appendix. Part VI notes that the proposed text could be adopted via budget reconciliation in 2025 and briefly touches upon some possible extensions of the model presented. Part VII concludes.
https://cis.org/Report/Snitch-Time-Can-Help-Deport-Nine
