With all the anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs, as a European it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
If I want to hire someone (local or remote) as an employer here, I better make sure the worker has a valid working permit. Fines for non-compliance towards the employer are huge, even for a single day of work. All paperwork has to be complete before any work is done. Even when hiring through intermediary companies who guarantee it's all legal, liability and fines remain in place for the ultimate employer if it turns out to be not so.
In the US, there is no reliable way to verify employment eligibility. What systems do exist tend to produce many false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent.
In industries that famously have many illegal employees, the companies have cover because the employees always have fraudulent documents. And since the company is required to accept those documents and not discriminate, the company can't be held liable for hiring them even though they are illegal.
Underlying this situation is that it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to issue mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility.
I'm an employer, and this is the form that needs to be filled out when we hire someone.
Notice the 2nd page of eligible documentation. A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment. Both can be easily forged and difficult to verify.
Also notice the bottom of the 2nd page: it allows (for a temporary period) a "receipt" of the document to be considered acceptable if it is "stolen" - meaning you don't even need to have the physical document at all.
And here's the kicker: This form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
> A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment
No, they're not. They're adequate to establish identity. (List B).
> form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
Correct. We're on the same page in respect of employers having no real requirement to verify work authorisation. This appears part of the policy choice that lets certain politicians rail against illegal immigration without threatening the economics they support.
Turning away potentially underage drinkers is encouraged (and not doing so badly punished) but denying someone legal allowable employment is subject to litigation.
"ANTI-DISCRIMINATION NOTICE: All employees can choose which acceptable documentation to present for Form I-9. Employers cannot ask
employees for documentation to verify information in Section 1, or specify which acceptable documentation employees must present for Section 2 or
Supplement B, Reverification and Rehire. Treating employees differently based on their citizenship, immigration status, or national origin may be illegal."[0]
It is against Federal law to reject any reasonable documentation that satisfies the I-9 requirements. Historically, you can bootstrap your way to meeting those requirements with not much more than affidavits and basic forgery.
There are many people who are US citizens that due to history or circumstances have no reliable documentation of such with which to bootstrap an ID -- I have people with no foundational documents in my own family. The system is designed to enable these people to bootstrap their paperwork without a reliable root document, which is of course exploitable by people that are in the US illegally.
State-issued IDs do not contain sufficient information to ensure eligibility for employment under Federal law.
There is already a Federal law that punishes employers who do not accept documents that satisfy the I-9 requirements. Illegal immigrants have documents that satisfy these requirements.
How many times does everyone who knows have to explain that it is illegal NOT to accept the documents. The more the law is enforced, the more such documents must be accepted.
There are conflicting valid problems, different problems that are both valid, but the solution to one inhibits the solution to the other, and the law as it stands favors preventing discrimination as being the higher priority over preventing illegal employment.
I doubt either you or I knows if that is even a wrong priority, because I can't say which is the bigger problem. I'll say I don't begrudge any immigrants getting jobs, whether they are technically illegal or not. They are human and until they actually commit theft or violence I don't get off on making them suffer.
Regardless, the problem is not enforcing the law. The law says you must accept the documents. There is no "diverted blame". If you find the prospect of the wrong person getting a job so outrageous, the "blame" is on the government for making it easy to fabricate their documents. The various documents that the law says you must accept, should not be so easy to fake up, and there should probably be some office that accepts these documents and vets them instead of just telling employers to file them and never looking at them.
> Illegal immigrants have documents that satisfy these requirements.
This reminds me of a Beavis and Butthead scene: "At the border. -Policeman: let them through. -Other policeman: Why ?. -Policeman: Mexicans know the capital of Texas, Americans don't"
The people who complain about illegal immigrant labor in the US also like their cheap chicken and other fruits from illegal immigrant labor.
It's a weird case where one business undercuts another by hiring cheap labor, and then the other business has to do the same thing or else risk going out of business.
Better enforcement might help, but remember, people like cheap chicken; it doesn't matter which way you vote.
People say this, but I always wonder if some rejiggering of the revenue allocation calculus might make it possible to keep chicken cheap while paying the workers a living wage. All you'd have to do is make a handful of executives very disappointed when they open the letter containing their tax bill - or when a federal law enforcement agent knocks on their door.
I think we're more likely to see AI-based automation further take humans out of the loop at chicken factories.
That being said: I personally think it makes more sense to lower the cost of plant-based proteins. It's always going to be cheaper when we eat the plants directly instead of having an animal convert the plant to protein.
For protein. That doesn't account for micronutrients. For better or worse, humans are omnivores. We might be able to live on less meat. (Collectively-speaking; this individual weightlifts and accumulates injuries like crazy if he doesn't eat enough meat, sorry.)
There's also an issue of lower fat/connective tissue content in plant-based meats (again, necessary to support joint and muscle recovery). Also, IIRC, the fats and oils in meat hold up better to high-temperature cooking than the ones in meat analogues. Best I can do is go pescatarian (which has its own issues at-scale).
If it needs fixing in law, let's do that... not this weird system we have now of turning our head the other way and waving it off as necessary while ignoring any criticism of said crazy system.
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
The anti-immigrant politicians can't punish the employers because they would be punishing their own donors.
If that sounds like a contradiction, consider that undocumented/illegal immigrants are effectively pawns who have no political power in the system, and the contradiction disappears entirely.
How does that make the contradiction disappear? It doesn't.
The resolution to the contradiction is that few candidates to Federal office are opposed to illegal immigration, and those that have opposed illegal immigration have mostly gotten away with merely saying they are opposed while not doing very much to stop illegal immigration.
In some states it is, but state-level elected officials have only weak levers with which to influence the rate of illegal immigration.
I don't know much about the topic, but conservative commentator Ann Coulter complained that although he certain got votes by talking about it, Trump didn't do much against illegal immigration and probably doesn't really want to do much about it.
Because it makes them look like they care for the people who elected them ("the imigrants make crimes/are taking jobs" narative). In reality the politicians only care about the biggest bider.
Because they never actually intend to, in any meaningful way. Trump is the wildcard; he was the first to actually do it, and the result was a lot of people complaining about rising construction costs and a shrinking labor pool. The actual goal for these donors and politicians is to keep a steady influx of exploitable labor to serve as the poorly-compensated, mistreated underclass that most Americans would riot rather than let themselves become; enough so that they always have something to run on, but not so many that they actually have to take action (e.g., when even liberals or progressives start having an issue with it). Same thing with Democrats and abortion.
The "interesting" (in Chinese proverbial terms) part is that we're living in times where a certain charlatan's actions have lead to the big red button actually being pushed on both matters. Whoever wins tonight, it certainly looks like we're about to test if each respective development has any bearing on polls, or if parties can just run on anti-immigration/pro-choice vibes ad nauseum, regardless of what's actually happened wrt each policy over the past (few) decade(s).
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers
This has been my proposed solution to the immigration problem in the US. Stop attempting to corral the people coming over, and shift 100% of your resources toward punishing those who employ them. How many people will attempt to sneak into the US when no one is willing to hire them?
I also view this as a "put your money where your mouth is" stance. It changes it from a political issue into one with a practical solution, and the people benefiting from cheap labor would have to be very creative to find fault with it.
The current Republican nominee ran his entire campaign on hating immigrants and has been known to hire illegal immigrants. They don't actually want to crackdown on it they just want to campaign on it.
Legislation is meaningless if it is not going to be enforced or if it will be used to destroy competition. As in law enforcement cannot deal with all cases, but they certainly can be nudged to deal with businesses that corrupt government doesn't want operating.
It’s a playbook as old as time. “At least we’re not <the other guy>”
When slavery was a thing, white southern workers made a lot less than northern workers. Racial superiority pumped the suckers up. Johnny Reb volunteered to be slaughtered so some aristocrat could own people.
Legislation is frequently proposed to do just this: require all employers to use E-Verify to ensure they don't hire illegal workers. The same people who are constantly firing up voters about immigration are opposed to this. The political issue is valuable to them, as is cheap, cowed, disposable labor. And they know if they succeeded in shipping their workers back over the border there would be economic and political mayhem.
I expect endless demagoguery about immigration and performative cruelty, but nothing that will challenge the bottom line.
> punishing the employer for employing an illegal worker
It's already the law.
This is why employers mandate I-9 forms as part of employment.
This is part of the larger indictment against Christine Chapman by the DoJ, who found she was falsifying employment verification documents and giving access to North Koreans in return for a portion of the embezzled sums.
Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO.
There is practically zero enforcement. Criminalise hiring illegal workers while stepping up enforcement and you dramatically reduce the value of illegal migration while shutting down large sections of the economy, thereby prompting supply-side inflation.
We don’t do it because this is a politically convenient middle ground that keeps illegal labor in the system while segregating it from competing with most of us. (Put another way: we have a regulated and an unregulated labor market. We like the fruits from the latter.)
This is the next key talking point for a winning candidate, and may be the ultimate solution to US immigration. It can and will gain popular support, but it will take someone sneaky enough to gain their party's support on other matters first; either after becoming the party's nominee or after being elected. Either one.
(If you propose this after being elected you might only last one term though; it's a bit of a rug pull. Better to pull the rug out from under your party rather than the voters.)
It's about investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property who push for RTO out of fear of their portfolio going down in value if people are not using the offices.
Most of the illegal immigrant hoopla has been performative bullshit to make to easier to control employees. If you’re in the chicken processing business or need casual labor, it’s a hell of alot cheaper to avoid paying for social security, worker’s compensation, etc by hiring people whom you can easily exploit by dangling the sword of ICE over their heads.
The US governance model segments immigration and work regulation - the former is a federal matter, the latter is almost exclusively regulated by the states (including enforced of federal rules).
In recent years as conservatives have veered into a more overtly racist and reactionary movement that’s shifted a bit.
> “The charges in this case should be a wakeup call for American companies and government agencies that employ remote IT workers,” Nicole Argentieri, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, said.
I really hope this doesn’t become ammunition for companies who force unjust and unnecessary return to office policies.
Unnecessary - perhaps. Ill-advised, since a lot of talent greatly prefers remote work - perhaps. But unjust? Aren't you taking it a bit far? You don't have the right to remote work.
Shouldn't businesses abide by contracts, even verbal ones? If you were hired in office, went remote and then RTO now I understand your viewpoint. But if the company hired you for a remote role that's part of the contract, and RTO is breach of contract.
Sorry, I was writing from the perspective of US employees, 99% whom do not have employment contracts (at least not regarding the length of employment). It is usually “at-will” employment, where either party can choose to walk away anytime.
It's "just business" to the company, it's very personal to anyone affected by it.
I find "it's just business" and "it's not personal" to be some of the most insulting and gaslighting phrases in the English language, by how they dehumanize the person at the receiving end of them.
Sorry to be blunt, but... so? Take the phrase away and it becomes "a business decision" which is just as impersonal, but that's an honest reflection of how decisions are made. Are you arguing against businesses making decisions or just the language?
If I stop shopping at a specific vendor, I am doing the same thing. The person operating the farmer's market stand or a food truck or whatever is a human too, but it's perfectly fine to say that you will no longer patronize that business.
People are affected by loss of income, and it is tragic. I don't think a buyer ceasing to buy from a seller is injustice, regardless if the relationship is employer/employee or customer/business.
It is society that should be providing the stability necessary for business to just be business. If a business makes a mistake, it is not unjust for the business to correct course which could involve changing its terms with its vendors (including employees).
The analogy falls apart somewhat when the vendor is prohibited from selling their product to others and the buyer provides their healthcare. Employment relationships are different than other kinds of business relationships and the law recognizes that.
As I understand, non competes are unenforceable in the US due to recent FTC actions. And employers pay for a portion of health insurance premiums with pre tax income. This tax benefit can and should be legislated away so that all individuals have the ability or inability to pay for health insurance with pre tax income.
In regards to when an employee or employer can terminate buying or selling labor, US law outside of Montana is “at-will”, meaning either party can stop buying or selling labor anytime they want, barring a contract that stipulates otherwise.
I find entitlement to be be one of the things wrong with the world today. It’s really a testament that we can have such opposing viewpoints at the same time without worrying about consequences, huh?
>Saying "it's just business" is just a canned phrase for minimizing a general dismissive attitude toward the welfare of workers.
reply
I don't think I am dismissive toward the welfare of workers. I strongly advocate for government helping workers by at least increasing/streamlining the process of receiving unemployment benefits and/or taxpayer funded efforts to re-train in the event of loss of income or even relocation assistance.
There is nothing to disagree here, it’s the philosophical definition of a right. It only exists if there is an obligation on the other side, in this case, to allow you to speak freely and without interference (applies both to individuals and the state).
My battery ran out before I could delete. I had another sentence there at first about "unless you call respecting rights an obligation," but I took it out because I didn't want to make a mess. To me an obligation in this context means the thing which is created by a positive right. (IME when someone uses "obligation" for negative rights, it's often for a bad-faith argument relying on the vagueness of "rights" to score a rhetorical point.) The analogous but different thing that some would say arises from a negative right, to me, is properly described another way.
My right to life[0] can still exist without you being obligated not to murder me. It means that I am always justified in self-defense, so if you try to kill me, I'm allowed to kill you back. Except not always. But basically always. Except for the exceptions we can frame a million different ways. In practice, neither of our rights to life are absolute...and so on, down the rabbit hole.
[0] But wait: My natural right? My legal right? In terms of enforcement? Or in some vague sense that I "have" a right and those are words I get to say, and, uh, if you don't like it then I'll say them again? In practice, no one cares. People just say "rights" to mean "I'm right."
Talking about rights is fraught and frustrating and mostly pointless, and my comment wasn't worth writing, but there's nothing I can do about it now.
Judgement? Sure. Personal? I sure hope not. I can declare myself the rightful recipient of all cash, but so what? Rights need some buy-in from society.
RTO mandates for remote hired workers aught to be considered defacto constructive dismissal and grounds for a civil suit for lost wages. The fact that companies can pull this kind of bait and switch is A.B.S.O.L.U.T.E.L.Y. a miscarriage of justice that is harming families and ruining lives.
I don’t like it either but it is a real concern. We can’t ignore it but we can try to frame the conversation correctly: we should be able to say this isn’t happening because we have good security policies and monitoring, etc.
A simple IT guy has access to company's finances in such way to move millions. Am I the only one who smells either ridiculous incompetence or plain fraud by the company trying to cover up "something"?
Articles say the guy was an AI developer. But how did he actually steal money from Fisker?
He installed malware on his work computer. Was this then used by North Korea to hack Fisker's internal systems and syphon of money somehow? Maybe I missed the details in one of the articles linked below.
- "But how did he actually steal money from Fisker?"
AFAICT, he merely worked for them. The only cash flows mentioned in the indictment [0] are simple wages.
The title is a bit misleading. "Millions" is the total haul of the North Korean remote workers over some 60-ish (??) companies. Fisker by itself paid no more than $214,596.00 (page 27, as "Company 6"). The article focuses on Fisker because it's an automotive news site.
I’m sure all the money the US government put into Fisker was already gone by then. A decade later and even more reminders of what a terrible “investment” that was.
Don't forget that a massive part of their income that allowed them to survive was selling carbon credits to the tune of billions of dollars, and that their cars have been massively discounted due to federal subsidies on EV cars (depending on your income level.... which btw doesn't apply to just them but makes a big difference).
I wouldn't qualify it as a subsidy. It was a credit that you take on your taxes. It's picking nits, sure, but subsidy sounds like the federal govt rolled up a truck full of money at EV car makers' factories.
The Federal government and state governments paying ~$10k to people who buy Teslas is the definition of a subsidy. People wrote $50k checks to Tesla and got $10k from the government for doing so.
A relative worked at Fisker recently. The loan you are talking about was in 2009. That version of Fisker went out of business in 2014.
The most "recent iteration" of Fisker was basically a company from scratch. It was only called Fisker because it's original founder (Henrik Fisker) retained the rights to the name and logo.
This time around there weren't any loans from the US govt.
Which also failed which proved that the founder is a bad bet and that if the US government chooses to invest again, it should steer clear of that dude.
My point is public money shouldn’t be used for “investment”. If they contracted with the company to make a fleet and they didn’t deliver at least the public would have recourse to liquidate and collect. By handing out free money on a risky gamble, everyone loses.
If there is an argument for RTO, it would be this.
Stu Sjouwerman: We were hiring a fairly specific, hard-to-find software engineer who had background in AI. We have a number of AI initiatives, and so we needed a software engineer to support all those initiatives.
Jessica Mendoza: The job was posted on online job forums, and pretty soon, resumes started to flow in from all over the country, and one candidate stood out. He said his name was Kyle.
Stu Sjouwerman: "Mr. Kyle" quote, unquote, air quotes, had experience with exactly everything that we needed. It was a very good interview. He was very open. He talked about his strengths and weaknesses, indicated where he felt he needed additional training and indicated a career path. And so, was the perfect interviewee, which made us move to the next step.
Jessica Mendoza: After conducting background checks, Stu's company decided to hire Kyle as a remote employee. They sent him a work laptop to an address in Washington State and started the onboarding process. But almost immediately, it became clear that Kyle was not who he said he was.
Stu Sjouwerman: At that point in time, our team started seeing very concerning traffic on that laptop.
Jessica Mendoza: What kind of concerning traffic?
Stu Sjouwerman: Well, Kyle immediately started downloading malware. We immediately saw that a whole bunch of things were happening that should not be. We tried to get in touch with him and asked if he needed any help. I think this was through Slack, and he said, "Yes, I am trying to debug my router and I'm following instructions from a list." And this is where it became very, very iffy, very fast.
Jessica Mendoza: The company shut down Kyle's laptop and quickly fired him. And then, they investigated. What exactly was Kyle doing? The answer took them completely by surprise.
Stu Sjouwerman: Yes, we have egg on our face because we hired a fake North Korean IT worker, but this is what happened. And if it can happen to us, it can happen to almost anybody.
Jessica Mendoza: It's kind of unbelievable that you hired a North Korean spy as one of your IT guys.
Stu Sjouwerman: Yes. That is pretty scary. And there are hundreds if not thousands that are actually, as we speak right now, in this same situation and delivering work for United States companies.
Did they not meet him face-to-face? It’s a small price to pay for confirmation that you’re talking to a real person. Even if not, you at least have someone’s face and information to report to the authorities.
lol. exactly the same as happened with off shoring in the late 90s. do people not learn?
first they hire telemarketing grunts. then HR gets complacent and normalize not doing any work. then they start using the same techniques for IT workers since for HR they're just more expensive telemarketing.
With all the anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs, as a European it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
If I want to hire someone (local or remote) as an employer here, I better make sure the worker has a valid working permit. Fines for non-compliance towards the employer are huge, even for a single day of work. All paperwork has to be complete before any work is done. Even when hiring through intermediary companies who guarantee it's all legal, liability and fines remain in place for the ultimate employer if it turns out to be not so.
In the US, there is no reliable way to verify employment eligibility. What systems do exist tend to produce many false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent.
In industries that famously have many illegal employees, the companies have cover because the employees always have fraudulent documents. And since the company is required to accept those documents and not discriminate, the company can't be held liable for hiring them even though they are illegal.
Underlying this situation is that it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to issue mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility.
> you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent
Genuine question: source?
> mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility
Yes, state-issued IDs, the infallible line keeping underage drinkers out of bars.
> Genuine question: source?
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9...
I'm an employer, and this is the form that needs to be filled out when we hire someone.
Notice the 2nd page of eligible documentation. A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment. Both can be easily forged and difficult to verify.
Also notice the bottom of the 2nd page: it allows (for a temporary period) a "receipt" of the document to be considered acceptable if it is "stolen" - meaning you don't even need to have the physical document at all.
And here's the kicker: This form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
> A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment
No, they're not. They're adequate to establish identity. (List B).
> form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
Correct. We're on the same page in respect of employers having no real requirement to verify work authorisation. This appears part of the policy choice that lets certain politicians rail against illegal immigration without threatening the economics they support.
Turning away potentially underage drinkers is encouraged (and not doing so badly punished) but denying someone legal allowable employment is subject to litigation.
"ANTI-DISCRIMINATION NOTICE: All employees can choose which acceptable documentation to present for Form I-9. Employers cannot ask employees for documentation to verify information in Section 1, or specify which acceptable documentation employees must present for Section 2 or Supplement B, Reverification and Rehire. Treating employees differently based on their citizenship, immigration status, or national origin may be illegal."[0]
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9...
It is against Federal law to reject any reasonable documentation that satisfies the I-9 requirements. Historically, you can bootstrap your way to meeting those requirements with not much more than affidavits and basic forgery.
There are many people who are US citizens that due to history or circumstances have no reliable documentation of such with which to bootstrap an ID -- I have people with no foundational documents in my own family. The system is designed to enable these people to bootstrap their paperwork without a reliable root document, which is of course exploitable by people that are in the US illegally.
State-issued IDs do not contain sufficient information to ensure eligibility for employment under Federal law.
[dead]
More like they can comply with their minimal legal obligation while accepting documentation that is readily identifiable as fraudulent.
People not motivated to seek shall not find.
The documents are fraudulent but valid. It violates Federal law for an employer to not accept these documents if offered.
People are motivated by not becoming Federal criminals.
> In the US, there is no reliable way to verify employment eligibility.
Enact a law to punish the employers and that would change overnight.
There is already a Federal law that punishes employers who do not accept documents that satisfy the I-9 requirements. Illegal immigrants have documents that satisfy these requirements.
Perhaps I should have said enforce the law. Falsified documents should not divert blame from the employers.
How many times does everyone who knows have to explain that it is illegal NOT to accept the documents. The more the law is enforced, the more such documents must be accepted.
There are conflicting valid problems, different problems that are both valid, but the solution to one inhibits the solution to the other, and the law as it stands favors preventing discrimination as being the higher priority over preventing illegal employment.
I doubt either you or I knows if that is even a wrong priority, because I can't say which is the bigger problem. I'll say I don't begrudge any immigrants getting jobs, whether they are technically illegal or not. They are human and until they actually commit theft or violence I don't get off on making them suffer.
Regardless, the problem is not enforcing the law. The law says you must accept the documents. There is no "diverted blame". If you find the prospect of the wrong person getting a job so outrageous, the "blame" is on the government for making it easy to fabricate their documents. The various documents that the law says you must accept, should not be so easy to fake up, and there should probably be some office that accepts these documents and vets them instead of just telling employers to file them and never looking at them.
> Illegal immigrants have documents that satisfy these requirements.
This reminds me of a Beavis and Butthead scene: "At the border. -Policeman: let them through. -Other policeman: Why ?. -Policeman: Mexicans know the capital of Texas, Americans don't"
The people who complain about illegal immigrant labor in the US also like their cheap chicken and other fruits from illegal immigrant labor.
It's a weird case where one business undercuts another by hiring cheap labor, and then the other business has to do the same thing or else risk going out of business.
Better enforcement might help, but remember, people like cheap chicken; it doesn't matter which way you vote.
People say this, but I always wonder if some rejiggering of the revenue allocation calculus might make it possible to keep chicken cheap while paying the workers a living wage. All you'd have to do is make a handful of executives very disappointed when they open the letter containing their tax bill - or when a federal law enforcement agent knocks on their door.
I think we're more likely to see AI-based automation further take humans out of the loop at chicken factories.
That being said: I personally think it makes more sense to lower the cost of plant-based proteins. It's always going to be cheaper when we eat the plants directly instead of having an animal convert the plant to protein.
For protein. That doesn't account for micronutrients. For better or worse, humans are omnivores. We might be able to live on less meat. (Collectively-speaking; this individual weightlifts and accumulates injuries like crazy if he doesn't eat enough meat, sorry.)
There's no facts in that argument: Meat is cultural, and we like it because it tastes good. There's no nutritional need for micronutrients from meat.
(This person still eats plenty of meat... Because it tastes good.)
That's incorrect.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1747-0080.12...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10305646/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93100-3
There's also an issue of lower fat/connective tissue content in plant-based meats (again, necessary to support joint and muscle recovery). Also, IIRC, the fats and oils in meat hold up better to high-temperature cooking than the ones in meat analogues. Best I can do is go pescatarian (which has its own issues at-scale).
No. The profits _must_ grow.
I don't like cheap chicken
There are legal means of hiring seasonal workers.
If it needs fixing in law, let's do that... not this weird system we have now of turning our head the other way and waving it off as necessary while ignoring any criticism of said crazy system.
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
The anti-immigrant politicians can't punish the employers because they would be punishing their own donors.
If that sounds like a contradiction, consider that undocumented/illegal immigrants are effectively pawns who have no political power in the system, and the contradiction disappears entirely.
How does that make the contradiction disappear? It doesn't.
The resolution to the contradiction is that few candidates to Federal office are opposed to illegal immigration, and those that have opposed illegal immigration have mostly gotten away with merely saying they are opposed while not doing very much to stop illegal immigration.
Being anti-illegal immigration is a very popular political position.
In some states it is, but state-level elected officials have only weak levers with which to influence the rate of illegal immigration.
I don't know much about the topic, but conservative commentator Ann Coulter complained that although he certain got votes by talking about it, Trump didn't do much against illegal immigration and probably doesn't really want to do much about it.
Because it makes them look like they care for the people who elected them ("the imigrants make crimes/are taking jobs" narative). In reality the politicians only care about the biggest bider.
Because they never actually intend to, in any meaningful way. Trump is the wildcard; he was the first to actually do it, and the result was a lot of people complaining about rising construction costs and a shrinking labor pool. The actual goal for these donors and politicians is to keep a steady influx of exploitable labor to serve as the poorly-compensated, mistreated underclass that most Americans would riot rather than let themselves become; enough so that they always have something to run on, but not so many that they actually have to take action (e.g., when even liberals or progressives start having an issue with it). Same thing with Democrats and abortion.
The "interesting" (in Chinese proverbial terms) part is that we're living in times where a certain charlatan's actions have lead to the big red button actually being pushed on both matters. Whoever wins tonight, it certainly looks like we're about to test if each respective development has any bearing on polls, or if parties can just run on anti-immigration/pro-choice vibes ad nauseum, regardless of what's actually happened wrt each policy over the past (few) decade(s).
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers
This has been my proposed solution to the immigration problem in the US. Stop attempting to corral the people coming over, and shift 100% of your resources toward punishing those who employ them. How many people will attempt to sneak into the US when no one is willing to hire them?
I also view this as a "put your money where your mouth is" stance. It changes it from a political issue into one with a practical solution, and the people benefiting from cheap labor would have to be very creative to find fault with it.
The scammers in question use stolen US citizens' identities. Same thing happens in Europe to a lesser degree.
The anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs is mostly fearmongering from the people employing illegal immigrants.
Wait, the ones who are getting a great deal on labor costs are the ones complaining about the source of that great deal?
I'm not so sure..
The current Republican nominee ran his entire campaign on hating immigrants and has been known to hire illegal immigrants. They don't actually want to crackdown on it they just want to campaign on it.
I see that, yes. But they will still create legislation against those means.
Legislation is meaningless if it is not going to be enforced or if it will be used to destroy competition. As in law enforcement cannot deal with all cases, but they certainly can be nudged to deal with businesses that corrupt government doesn't want operating.
Lucy with the football, bro.
It’s a playbook as old as time. “At least we’re not <the other guy>”
When slavery was a thing, white southern workers made a lot less than northern workers. Racial superiority pumped the suckers up. Johnny Reb volunteered to be slaughtered so some aristocrat could own people.
too much work im gonna hire the immigrant sorry not sorry~
Legislation is frequently proposed to do just this: require all employers to use E-Verify to ensure they don't hire illegal workers. The same people who are constantly firing up voters about immigration are opposed to this. The political issue is valuable to them, as is cheap, cowed, disposable labor. And they know if they succeeded in shipping their workers back over the border there would be economic and political mayhem.
I expect endless demagoguery about immigration and performative cruelty, but nothing that will challenge the bottom line.
Here's a recent bit of commentary on E-Verify: https://jabberwocking.com/the-long-sad-story-of-e-verify/
> punishing the employer for employing an illegal worker
It's already the law.
This is why employers mandate I-9 forms as part of employment.
This is part of the larger indictment against Christine Chapman by the DoJ, who found she was falsifying employment verification documents and giving access to North Koreans in return for a portion of the embezzled sums.
Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO.
> already the law
There is practically zero enforcement. Criminalise hiring illegal workers while stepping up enforcement and you dramatically reduce the value of illegal migration while shutting down large sections of the economy, thereby prompting supply-side inflation.
We don’t do it because this is a politically convenient middle ground that keeps illegal labor in the system while segregating it from competing with most of us. (Put another way: we have a regulated and an unregulated labor market. We like the fruits from the latter.)
This is the next key talking point for a winning candidate, and may be the ultimate solution to US immigration. It can and will gain popular support, but it will take someone sneaky enough to gain their party's support on other matters first; either after becoming the party's nominee or after being elected. Either one.
(If you propose this after being elected you might only last one term though; it's a bit of a rug pull. Better to pull the rug out from under your party rather than the voters.)
> Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO.
Citation needed. I find this very unlikely as the root cause.
It's about investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property who push for RTO out of fear of their portfolio going down in value if people are not using the offices.
> investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property
Are you in San Francisco? This is a conspiracy theory I hear a lot in San Francisco.
It's a dumb conspiracy theory at the macro-scale, and the overlap between CBRE or JLL and a company's board is minimal
It is, but I’m curious about why it’s so popular. Is it a Musk thing?
It's an HN+Reddit thing.
The userbases overlap significantly now.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/a-commercial-real-estate-crisis-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/commercial...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-02/how-home-...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/27/office-bloc...
None of these articles prove your argument.
Most of the illegal immigrant hoopla has been performative bullshit to make to easier to control employees. If you’re in the chicken processing business or need casual labor, it’s a hell of alot cheaper to avoid paying for social security, worker’s compensation, etc by hiring people whom you can easily exploit by dangling the sword of ICE over their heads.
The US governance model segments immigration and work regulation - the former is a federal matter, the latter is almost exclusively regulated by the states (including enforced of federal rules).
In recent years as conservatives have veered into a more overtly racist and reactionary movement that’s shifted a bit.
This appears to be the indictment:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/media/1352191/dl (pdf)
Some related coverage:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/arizona-woman-accus... ("Arizona woman accused of helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at 300 companies")
> “The charges in this case should be a wakeup call for American companies and government agencies that employ remote IT workers,” Nicole Argentieri, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, said.
I really hope this doesn’t become ammunition for companies who force unjust and unnecessary return to office policies.
Unnecessary - perhaps. Ill-advised, since a lot of talent greatly prefers remote work - perhaps. But unjust? Aren't you taking it a bit far? You don't have the right to remote work.
I'd consider it unjust if I was hired for a remote role and they changed that deal later.
It’s just business. Everything is subject to change all the time. Unfair, rude, etc, but unjust is a bridge too far.
Unjust might be society not offering a sufficient safety net to ride out income volatility.
Shouldn't businesses abide by contracts, even verbal ones? If you were hired in office, went remote and then RTO now I understand your viewpoint. But if the company hired you for a remote role that's part of the contract, and RTO is breach of contract.
> if the company hired you for a remote role that's part of the contract, and RTO is breach of contract
Sure, and the contract should be terminated.
Within the context of this article, learning you may be funding sanctioned activities is a valid reason to revisit your business assumptions.
>Sure, and the contract should be terminated.
So in your view all contracts should be meaningless if one party doesn't want it anymore? Do we even need contracts then?
Sorry, I was writing from the perspective of US employees, 99% whom do not have employment contracts (at least not regarding the length of employment). It is usually “at-will” employment, where either party can choose to walk away anytime.
Yes, promissory estoppel is a thing.
It's "just business" to the company, it's very personal to anyone affected by it.
I find "it's just business" and "it's not personal" to be some of the most insulting and gaslighting phrases in the English language, by how they dehumanize the person at the receiving end of them.
Sorry to be blunt, but... so? Take the phrase away and it becomes "a business decision" which is just as impersonal, but that's an honest reflection of how decisions are made. Are you arguing against businesses making decisions or just the language?
If I stop shopping at a specific vendor, I am doing the same thing. The person operating the farmer's market stand or a food truck or whatever is a human too, but it's perfectly fine to say that you will no longer patronize that business.
People are affected by loss of income, and it is tragic. I don't think a buyer ceasing to buy from a seller is injustice, regardless if the relationship is employer/employee or customer/business.
It is society that should be providing the stability necessary for business to just be business. If a business makes a mistake, it is not unjust for the business to correct course which could involve changing its terms with its vendors (including employees).
The analogy falls apart somewhat when the vendor is prohibited from selling their product to others and the buyer provides their healthcare. Employment relationships are different than other kinds of business relationships and the law recognizes that.
As I understand, non competes are unenforceable in the US due to recent FTC actions. And employers pay for a portion of health insurance premiums with pre tax income. This tax benefit can and should be legislated away so that all individuals have the ability or inability to pay for health insurance with pre tax income.
In regards to when an employee or employer can terminate buying or selling labor, US law outside of Montana is “at-will”, meaning either party can stop buying or selling labor anytime they want, barring a contract that stipulates otherwise.
I was referencing exclusivity clauses rather than noncompetes, and the vastly different nature of employment law from other contractual arrangements.
I find entitlement to be be one of the things wrong with the world today. It’s really a testament that we can have such opposing viewpoints at the same time without worrying about consequences, huh?
"Unjust" is really just a matter of personal taste. Your claim that it's just has no more validity than a claim that it's unjust.
Saying "it's just business" is just a canned phrase for minimizing a general dismissive attitude toward the welfare of workers.
>Saying "it's just business" is just a canned phrase for minimizing a general dismissive attitude toward the welfare of workers. reply
I don't think I am dismissive toward the welfare of workers. I strongly advocate for government helping workers by at least increasing/streamlining the process of receiving unemployment benefits and/or taxpayer funded efforts to re-train in the event of loss of income or even relocation assistance.
> You don't have the right to remote work.
What I have a "right" to is ultimately a matter of personal judgment. Isn't it?
I'm all for WFH but a right implies someone else has an obligation
I disagree. How does someone else have an obligation to my freedom of speech?
There is nothing to disagree here, it’s the philosophical definition of a right. It only exists if there is an obligation on the other side, in this case, to allow you to speak freely and without interference (applies both to individuals and the state).
Only for positive rights, and not always for those either.
No. You have an obligation not to violate my negative rights, too, e.g. we prohibit murder but don’t guarantee a right to life at any cost.
My battery ran out before I could delete. I had another sentence there at first about "unless you call respecting rights an obligation," but I took it out because I didn't want to make a mess. To me an obligation in this context means the thing which is created by a positive right. (IME when someone uses "obligation" for negative rights, it's often for a bad-faith argument relying on the vagueness of "rights" to score a rhetorical point.) The analogous but different thing that some would say arises from a negative right, to me, is properly described another way.
My right to life[0] can still exist without you being obligated not to murder me. It means that I am always justified in self-defense, so if you try to kill me, I'm allowed to kill you back. Except not always. But basically always. Except for the exceptions we can frame a million different ways. In practice, neither of our rights to life are absolute...and so on, down the rabbit hole.
[0] But wait: My natural right? My legal right? In terms of enforcement? Or in some vague sense that I "have" a right and those are words I get to say, and, uh, if you don't like it then I'll say them again? In practice, no one cares. People just say "rights" to mean "I'm right."
Talking about rights is fraught and frustrating and mostly pointless, and my comment wasn't worth writing, but there's nothing I can do about it now.
What kind of "right" are we talking about here? Constitutional? Natural?
Not remotely. Wow. You have a right to seek whatever you want, but seek only.
Judgement? Sure. Personal? I sure hope not. I can declare myself the rightful recipient of all cash, but so what? Rights need some buy-in from society.
RTO mandates for remote hired workers aught to be considered defacto constructive dismissal and grounds for a civil suit for lost wages. The fact that companies can pull this kind of bait and switch is A.B.S.O.L.U.T.E.L.Y. a miscarriage of justice that is harming families and ruining lives.
If the outcome of the policies is an unjust outcome I don't think the term is inaccurate, even if the common use of it refers to one's legal rights.
I don’t like it either but it is a real concern. We can’t ignore it but we can try to frame the conversation correctly: we should be able to say this isn’t happening because we have good security policies and monitoring, etc.
Reminds me of https://blog.knowbe4.com/how-a-north-korean-fake-it-worker-t... - I seem to remember it coming up here at the time.
A simple IT guy has access to company's finances in such way to move millions. Am I the only one who smells either ridiculous incompetence or plain fraud by the company trying to cover up "something"?
That was my first reaction, but everything really is computerized these days. I felt the same way about Snowden's access.
Articles say the guy was an AI developer. But how did he actually steal money from Fisker?
He installed malware on his work computer. Was this then used by North Korea to hack Fisker's internal systems and syphon of money somehow? Maybe I missed the details in one of the articles linked below.
- "But how did he actually steal money from Fisker?"
AFAICT, he merely worked for them. The only cash flows mentioned in the indictment [0] are simple wages.
The title is a bit misleading. "Millions" is the total haul of the North Korean remote workers over some 60-ish (??) companies. Fisker by itself paid no more than $214,596.00 (page 27, as "Company 6"). The article focuses on Fisker because it's an automotive news site.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/media/1352191/dl (pdf)
I’m sure all the money the US government put into Fisker was already gone by then. A decade later and even more reminders of what a terrible “investment” that was.
What was all the money?
It's so far worked out for Tesla, and at least of the major auto companies in the US they're still alive when they could have gone under previously.
Supporting new private industry is good policy, if done with balance. China has been employing this very successfully industry after industry.
US govt. invested in Tesla? That's news to me.
DOE gave them a $465 million loan to build out their Fremont factory during the height of the GFC: https://www.energy.gov/lpo/tesla#:~:text=In%20January%202010...
They also have received various other grants, including ~$17 million for chargers.
adding context to the above comment:
> Tesla repaid its $465 million loan from the US Department of Energy (DoE) nine years early in 2013
Don't forget that a massive part of their income that allowed them to survive was selling carbon credits to the tune of billions of dollars, and that their cars have been massively discounted due to federal subsidies on EV cars (depending on your income level.... which btw doesn't apply to just them but makes a big difference).
I wouldn't qualify it as a subsidy. It was a credit that you take on your taxes. It's picking nits, sure, but subsidy sounds like the federal govt rolled up a truck full of money at EV car makers' factories.
The Federal government and state governments paying ~$10k to people who buy Teslas is the definition of a subsidy. People wrote $50k checks to Tesla and got $10k from the government for doing so.
A relative worked at Fisker recently. The loan you are talking about was in 2009. That version of Fisker went out of business in 2014.
The most "recent iteration" of Fisker was basically a company from scratch. It was only called Fisker because it's original founder (Henrik Fisker) retained the rights to the name and logo.
This time around there weren't any loans from the US govt.
Which also failed which proved that the founder is a bad bet and that if the US government chooses to invest again, it should steer clear of that dude.
Can’t decide if irony or surprise at the empirical naïveté is surprising me more about a HN comment advocating for blacklisting once-failed founders.
My point is public money shouldn’t be used for “investment”. If they contracted with the company to make a fleet and they didn’t deliver at least the public would have recourse to liquidate and collect. By handing out free money on a risky gamble, everyone loses.
Fisker continues to widen my eyes. Unfortunately.
If there is an argument for RTO, it would be this.
Stu Sjouwerman: We were hiring a fairly specific, hard-to-find software engineer who had background in AI. We have a number of AI initiatives, and so we needed a software engineer to support all those initiatives.
Jessica Mendoza: The job was posted on online job forums, and pretty soon, resumes started to flow in from all over the country, and one candidate stood out. He said his name was Kyle.
Stu Sjouwerman: "Mr. Kyle" quote, unquote, air quotes, had experience with exactly everything that we needed. It was a very good interview. He was very open. He talked about his strengths and weaknesses, indicated where he felt he needed additional training and indicated a career path. And so, was the perfect interviewee, which made us move to the next step.
Jessica Mendoza: After conducting background checks, Stu's company decided to hire Kyle as a remote employee. They sent him a work laptop to an address in Washington State and started the onboarding process. But almost immediately, it became clear that Kyle was not who he said he was.
Stu Sjouwerman: At that point in time, our team started seeing very concerning traffic on that laptop.
Jessica Mendoza: What kind of concerning traffic?
Stu Sjouwerman: Well, Kyle immediately started downloading malware. We immediately saw that a whole bunch of things were happening that should not be. We tried to get in touch with him and asked if he needed any help. I think this was through Slack, and he said, "Yes, I am trying to debug my router and I'm following instructions from a list." And this is where it became very, very iffy, very fast.
Jessica Mendoza: The company shut down Kyle's laptop and quickly fired him. And then, they investigated. What exactly was Kyle doing? The answer took them completely by surprise.
Stu Sjouwerman: Yes, we have egg on our face because we hired a fake North Korean IT worker, but this is what happened. And if it can happen to us, it can happen to almost anybody.
Jessica Mendoza: It's kind of unbelievable that you hired a North Korean spy as one of your IT guys.
Stu Sjouwerman: Yes. That is pretty scary. And there are hundreds if not thousands that are actually, as we speak right now, in this same situation and delivering work for United States companies.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/your-new-hire-may-b...
Did they not meet him face-to-face? It’s a small price to pay for confirmation that you’re talking to a real person. Even if not, you at least have someone’s face and information to report to the authorities.
Imagine losing your job and then hearing that a NK spy stole millions, resulting in your job loss.
Hiring in IT is a joke, there is an obsession with gamifying everything resulting in only people willing to play the game actually getting hired.
It doesn't say millions were stolen. The indictment says North Koreans were paid millions for their work.
I wonder what the quality of work was like
lol. exactly the same as happened with off shoring in the late 90s. do people not learn?
first they hire telemarketing grunts. then HR gets complacent and normalize not doing any work. then they start using the same techniques for IT workers since for HR they're just more expensive telemarketing.