Enforcement, Incentives and the Meaning of National Control

The United States cannot credibly claim to control illegal immigration while leaving one of its most powerful incentives largely intact: access to American employment.

Border enforcement matters. Removal matters. Visa enforcement matters. But none of those measures fully addresses the economic transaction that occurs when an employer knowingly puts an unauthorized worker on the payroll, pays that worker off the books, hides that worker behind a subcontractor, or deliberately avoids the verification systems designed to determine whether the worker is legally employable.

The principle should be uncomplicated:

If a person has no lawful authorization to work in the United States, an American employer should not be permitted to profit from employing that person.

Federal law already recognizes employer responsibility. Under 8 U.S.C. § 1324a, it is unlawful to knowingly hire an unauthorized alien, and it is unlawful to continue employing an individual after the employer knows that person is unauthorized to work.¹ The statute also addresses certain uses of contract labor where an employer knowingly obtains unauthorized labor through a contract, subcontract, or exchange.

The problem is not that employer responsibility is absent from federal law.

The problem is that the United States has never imposed a verification and enforcement regime strong enough to eliminate the economic advantage of violating that law.

The Contradiction at the Center of Federal Employment Verification

Every covered employee hired in the United States must complete the federal Form I-9 employment-eligibility process. The employer must examine documentation establishing identity and employment authorization and certify that the required review occurred.²

Yet for most employers, federal law stops short of requiring the obvious next step: electronically checking that information through E-Verify.

The federal government itself states the distinction plainly. Form I-9 is mandatory. E-Verify is voluntary for most employers. E-Verify electronically compares information taken from Form I-9 with records available to the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.³

That is the contradiction.

If employment eligibility is important enough that every American citizen entering a covered new job must prove eligibility, then employers should not be permitted to decline the federal government's own electronic verification mechanism when determining whether another worker is legally employable.

An employer should not be able to say, in effect:

I looked at the paperwork. I chose not to check the federal system. That was enough.

It should not be enough.

Electronic verification should be the national minimum standard for employment eligibility, not an optional additional step.

The Economic Magnet Must Be Confronted

Illegal immigration is frequently discussed as though it begins and ends at the border.

It does not.

For many people who enter or remain in the United States unlawfully, access to American wages is a major economic incentive. The border may be the point of unlawful entry, but the labor market is where much of the economic reward is realized.

An enforcement strategy that attempts to restrict unlawful entry while tolerating a market for unauthorized labor is structurally contradictory. Government attacks the supply while allowing demand to survive.

TSR's position is direct:

If unlawful employment becomes reliably unavailable, one of the principal economic incentives sustaining illegal immigration collapses.

That statement does not require pretending that every case of illegal immigration is motivated exclusively by employment. Family relationships, asylum claims, criminal activity, political instability, and other considerations can affect individual decisions.

But those exceptions do not erase the central economic reality.

If a person contemplating illegal migration knows that lawful employment will be unavailable, unauthorized employment will be aggressively detected, employers will refuse to risk severe sanctions, fraudulent hiring schemes will be prosecuted, and subcontracting will not provide an escape hatch, the calculation changes dramatically.

The economic magnet weakens.

That should be an explicit objective of federal immigration policy.

Congress Must Pass the Mandatory E-Verify Act of 2026

Congress now has legislation before it that directly addresses the voluntary-verification problem.

S. 4620, the Mandatory E-Verify Act of 2026, should be passed.

Introduced in the Senate on May 21, 2026, S. 4620 would permanently establish E-Verify and mandate its use by all employers. The bill was read twice and referred to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.⁴

The legislation does not merely encourage broader participation. It creates a nationwide requirement for employers to use E-Verify and establishes an implementation schedule that ultimately reaches employers of every size.⁴

Just as importantly, the bill addresses one of the most predictable avenues of evasion: contract and subcontract labor. Its structure is designed to prevent employers from escaping verification obligations simply by inserting another business entity between themselves and the people performing the work.⁴

That principle should be non-negotiable.

A staffing agency cannot become a shield.

A subcontractor cannot become a shield.

A labor broker cannot become a shield.

A shell company cannot become a shield.

And deliberate ignorance cannot become a business strategy.

Failure to Verify Should Be Treated as Evasion When It Is Willful

A serious enforcement system must distinguish between an honest mistake and deliberate circumvention.

An employer that makes a clerical error, receives bad information, or encounters an incorrect government record should have due process and a reasonable opportunity to correct the problem.

But an employer that knowingly falsifies information, deliberately refuses required verification, manufactures sham subcontracting arrangements, destroys employment records, uses labor brokers to conceal unauthorized hiring, or continues employment after definitive notice of nonauthorization is doing something fundamentally different.

That is not paperwork failure. That is evasion.

S. 4620 moves in this direction by creating penalties for failure to use E-Verify and by strengthening the consequences associated with unauthorized employment and repeat violations.⁴

TSR believes Congress should go further.

Deliberate schemes designed to defeat employment verification should themselves constitute prosecutable offenses. Federal law should reach the owners, executives, managers, labor contractors, and other responsible decision-makers who knowingly direct or participate in those schemes.

A Penalty Is Meaningless If Breaking the Law Remains Profitable

Current federal law already provides civil penalties for knowing employment violations and criminal penalties for a pattern or practice of such violations. Under existing 8 U.S.C. § 1324a, the criminal penalty for a pattern or practice is capped at $3,000 per unauthorized alien and no more than six months imprisonment for the entire pattern or practice.¹

That is not an adequate deterrent for an employer that calculates unauthorized labor as a source of economic advantage.

S. 4620 would significantly strengthen federal sanctions, including higher civil penalties, penalties for failure to use E-Verify, enhanced sanctions for repeat violations, and stronger criminal consequences for patterns or practices of unauthorized employment.⁴

TSR supports those changes.

TSR also believes Congress should go substantially further for knowing and willful violations.

The governing principle should be simple:

The penalty must be greater than the economic benefit of breaking the law.

If the expected savings from unauthorized labor exceed the expected cost of enforcement, government has created a business incentive to violate its own immigration laws.

TSR's Proposed Employer-Enforcement Standard

The following penalties are TSR policy recommendations. They are not the penalties currently contained in federal law, and they should apply only where knowing and willful conduct is proven with full due process.

First Willful Offense

A first knowing and willful violation should carry a minimum civil penalty of $5,000 per unauthorized worker, criminal prosecution of responsible decision-makers where the evidence supports it, imprisonment of up to one year for qualifying willful conduct, recovery of unpaid federal employment and payroll obligations where applicable, and mandatory E-Verify compliance audits during a substantial probationary period.

The purpose of a first-offense sanction should be unmistakable: make the violation costly enough that there is no rational business case for repeating it.

Second Willful Offense

A second knowing violation should be treated as evidence that the employer did not misunderstand the law but deliberately chose to disregard it.

TSR supports a minimum $25,000 penalty per unauthorized worker, felony prosecution of responsible decision-makers, a mandatory five-year term of imprisonment upon conviction for qualifying repeat criminal conduct, a minimum five-year prohibition on federal contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements, and intensive federal compliance monitoring.

At that point, the government is no longer dealing with carelessness.

It is dealing with deliberate recidivism.

Third Willful Offense or Organized Evasion Scheme

A third knowing offense—or an organized scheme involving systematic concealment, fraudulent records, shell contractors, labor brokers, or other mechanisms designed to defeat employment verification—should expose responsible actors to a minimum $50,000 penalty per unauthorized worker, imprisonment of 10 to 20 years for qualifying criminal conduct, permanent federal debarment, suspension or revocation of applicable federal licenses, and forfeiture, subject to due process, of business assets or proceeds proven to have been materially used in or derived from the illegal-employment enterprise.

Those penalties are intentionally severe.

They should be.

An employer repeatedly violating the law after previous enforcement actions is not making a paperwork mistake. That employer is making a conscious economic decision that unauthorized labor is worth the risk.

Government's job is to make that calculation irrational.

Enforcement Must Reach the People Making the Decisions

Corporate penalties alone are insufficient.

A corporation cannot go to prison.

If responsibility ends with a fine assessed against a business entity, owners and executives can effectively treat enforcement as a corporate expense while preserving the economic strategy that produced the violation.

Where prosecutors can prove that an owner, executive, manager, labor contractor, or other responsible decision-maker knowingly directed or participated in illegal hiring or verification evasion, individual accountability should follow.

That does not mean prosecuting an innocent manager because an employee presented sophisticated fraudulent documents.

It means prosecuting the people who knowingly make illegal employment possible.

There is a difference between being deceived and choosing not to know.

There is a difference between a clerical error and an organized hiring scheme.

There is a difference between good-faith compliance and willful blindness.

The law should recognize those differences—and punish deliberate violations severely.

Due Process Does Not Require Optional Enforcement

Critics of universal E-Verify raise concerns about erroneous nonconfirmations, employee due process, privacy, identity theft, discrimination, and administrative burden.

Those concerns deserve safeguards.

They do not justify leaving verification voluntary.

A national verification system should be accurate, secure, and transparent. Workers should have a meaningful process to correct incorrect government records. Employers should be prohibited from selectively verifying workers based on ethnicity, nationality, language, appearance, or other improper criteria.

But none of those protections requires giving employers the option to avoid electronic verification altogether.

Due process is not the same thing as optional enforcement.

Enforcement Must Be Predictable, Not Political

Businesses deliberately avoiding immigration-employment law need a credible expectation that violations will be detected, enforced, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

That should be the minimum standard.

Enforcement cannot depend on which administration occupies the White House.

It cannot consist of several headline-producing raids followed by years of neglect.

It cannot punish one industry while ignoring another.

And it cannot allow politically connected or economically powerful corporations to receive treatment unavailable to smaller employers.

The rule should be predictable:

• Verify every covered new hire.
• Use E-Verify.
• Do not knowingly employ unauthorized workers.
• Do not manipulate or falsify the verification process.
• Do not use contractors or intermediaries to evade the law.
• Correct genuine mistakes.
• Prosecute deliberate violations.
• Punish repeat offenders severely.

That is what predictable enforcement looks like.

The Economic Incentive Must End

The immigration debate spends enormous energy discussing what happens at the border while too often refusing to confront what happens after the border has been crossed.

That must change.

Illegal employment is not a secondary immigration issue. It is one of the central economic incentives sustaining illegal immigration.

When employers knowingly provide jobs to people who are not authorized to work, they do more than violate an employment rule.

They create demand.

They preserve an economic reward for unlawful presence.

They place employers following the law at a competitive disadvantage.

They distort labor markets.

And they undermine the government's ability to make its immigration laws meaningful.

America cannot arrest its way out of illegal immigration while simultaneously maintaining an employment market that rewards it.

The country must attack both sides of the equation.

Secure the border.

Enforce removal orders where the law requires them.

Enforce visa and status requirements.

And eliminate the employment incentive that makes illegal presence economically sustainable.

Congress should begin by passing S. 4620, the Mandatory E-Verify Act of 2026, and then strengthen employer sanctions until knowingly employing unauthorized labor is no longer a profitable business decision.⁴

If illegal employment is reliably unavailable, one of the principal economic incentives for illegal immigration collapses. Employers who deliberately preserve that incentive should face consequences severe enough that obeying the law is always the only rational business decision.

This is not hostility toward lawful immigrants.

It is not hostility toward people legally authorized to work in the United States.

It is a demand that the immigration laws enacted by the United States actually mean what they say—and that employers whose deliberate decisions sustain illegal employment be held fully accountable for those decisions.