That law imposes significant penalties on employers who hire undocumented persons, as well as potential criminal sanctions for knowing and repeated violations. If that law were vigorously enforced, those penalties would pay for the costs incurred by doing increased inspections of worksites, such as meat packing plants in the Midwest and farms in California.
As in many respects, however, our present administration caters to the interests of businesses, not to the interests of ordinary people. The simplest, cheapest and most effective way to end the immigration crisis is to enforce IRCA and impose the penalties provided by that law. The use of modern technology would make it easy to verify the immigration status of employees and would end this crisis much more quickly and cheaply than having masked ICE agents rounding up people on the streets of Minneapolis, Phoenix, San Diego and our other cities.