Hiring Centers

Hiring Centers

Many people see hiring centers as a solution to the problems we have with day laborers, however, they are more of a temporary fix to the major problem of illegal immigration. Building a hiring center takes a large amount of money, and countless hours of volunteer work to run. We do not need to be spending our time and money to help an illegal immigrant get an illegal job. On top of that, hiring centers tend to encourage new illegal immigrants to come to our country in search of money. From 1996 to 2003, fifty-eight percent of our country's employment growth was due to foreign-born workers, due to the large number of illegal workers the working standards drop, and working conditions for legal workers goes down. Along with this increase of illegal immigrants in certain communities, it tends to encroach the safety of those living in the area making them worry about their family's safety as well as the safety of their community.

The only problem hiring centers do solve is an issue of safety, and that is getting the day laborers off the streets, and away from the fronts of businesses. One of the arguments supporting hiring centers in our class debate was that each center could create some type of documentation for the workers, therefore making the process safer than before, when there was no type of documentation or any information on most of the illegal workers. The idea being that if any of the workers coming through these centers were to have something happen to them while they are in the

United States, whether it be with the law or something personal, such as a health issue, that there would be some sort of documentation of that individual. This would increase the safety somewhat for the workers, but what it fails to do is to find or show any type of previous information of that person, such as their criminal history, health, or anything else. This is a major concern for the citizens of the areas near the hiring centers. All of the illegal immigrants that come to the United States have no known history and could have just committed murder and fled their country to escape any punishment, we have no idea when they come here illegally. In a film about Farmingville, a town in New York, the people in that community were frustrated with the large amount of day laborers that were in their area, and on the streets throughout their town. In one neighborhood, the people were complaining about a group of about thirty of these day laborers living in one house together. The people in this neighborhood were afraid to let their children out in the without keeping an eye on them because of the day laborers in the area, that they knew nothing about.

Hiring centers completely ignore the rules against illegal workers which in turn should make them illegal also. They ignore the work status of the workers that come through, just making the process of illegal immigration easier. To defend themselves, the hiring centers say that it is the responsibility of the employer to check the eligibility of the workers they hire. They are right in a way, however, when the local government is supporting the hiring center, it is plausible for an employer to suppose that a worker that is available through the center is legally able to work. This not only encourages the employer to break the law by hiring them, but it also eases the process that an illegal worker must go through to get work. In 1986 the Immigration Reduction and Control Act was adopted, this made the hiring of an illegal immigrant illegal for an employer, and prohibited the continued employment of illegal workers. Therefore, there should currently be no illegal workers with jobs in the United States, at least legally. This law also made the concealing of, harboring, and shielding of illegal aliens from detection a felony, along with the employers inability to show work authorization documents, paying in cash, avoiding taxes, and failure to pay employer contributions. If hiring an illegal immigrant is illegal for an employer to do, then making a hiring center, that is most of the time funded by the local government, to set up an illegal alien with a job should also be illegal.

Also when a community or city establishes a hiring center, this tends to encourage more illegal immigrants to come to that area. Most of the undocumented