Are you willing to lose your job so an illegal worker can be deported to Mexico?
Think about it.
Under Arizona's employer-sanctions law, a business can be shut down for 10 days for hiring one undocumented worker.
Let's say that business has 100 employees.
The undocumented worker gets deported.
Ninety-nine other workers lose 10 days' pay.
If another undocumented worker is found on the payroll within three years, the employer's business license is permanently revoked.
Another undocumented worker gets deported.
Ninety-eight people are out of work.
You could be one of them.
In the bumper-sticker world of simplistic solutions, some might say, "Tough luck." After all, we have to do something about illegal immigration, don't we?
In the real world, this law is entirely unreasonable.
It requires businesses to verify the work status of new employees through a federal program called Basic Pilot, which cannot detect identity fraud and is considered unreliable even by some who use it. Meatpacker Swift & Co. was using Basic Pilot when federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested more than 1,200 workers at plants in six states last December.
Supporters of Arizona's law say using Basic Pilot provides a defense against the sanctions in the state law. Businesspeople disagree. They say the language of the law imposes the business death penalty on the second offense. Period.
You can say it serves them right. You can correctly point out that, if there were no jobs for illegal immigrants, few would enter our country illegally.
You are right. We need a solution to the problem of illegal immigration.
This is not the solution.
This is another problem.
And you, average Arizona resident, already are suffering consequences for a law that doesn't even go into effect until Jan. 1.
Consider: In the next 15 years, 100,000 employees will be hired at the fast-food restaurants Jason LeVecke owns in Arizona. Anybody can make two mistakes in 100,000.
Under Arizona's law, those mistakes could cost LeVecke his license to operate all 56 of his Carl's Jr. restaurants and put about 1,250 people out of work.
LeVecke paid for development rights to open 45 more stores in Arizona. Because of the employer-sanctions law, he has redirected his business development to Texas.
"It's just too risky," the Tempe native says. "I can't afford to keep all my eggs in Arizona anymore."
Consider: Nan Walden is vice president and counsel of Farmers Investment Co., the largest grower and processor of pecans in the nation. For 60 years, it has operated out of the Green Valley/Sahuarita area. Walden says she has a stable, legal workforce. But what if she makes one mistake?
"I have millions of dollars of inventory in cold storage," she says. "If they shut us down for 10 days, we'd be out of business."
She says businesses shouldn't be subject to state sanctions if they follow federal rules. Under this law, they are.
"The damage this will do to Arizona's economy over the next few years will be hard to fix," she says.
Consider: Sundt Construction pays $18 to $20 an hour plus benefits for skilled crafts workers, says J. Doug Pruitt, chairman and CEO. Yet the company has turned down a "considerable amount of work" in Arizona in the past two years because of labor shortages.
"We can advertise till hell freezes over, and there is not a supply of skilled workers," he says.
Pruitt's company already uses the Basic Pilot program because he has no desire to hire illegal workers. But he says the program has a high error rate.
The two-strikes provision of the employer-sanctions law "is like the death penalty for running a stop sign," he says.
Consider: Joe Sigg, director of government relations at the Arizona Farm Bureau, says dairies pay $10 to $12 an hour and can't find enough workers. Seasonal crop pickers make $17 to $18 an hour, but farmers can't find workers.
Sigg says people with legitimate work papers have been increasingly reluctant to come across the border to work near Yuma because of the increasingly hostile attitude toward migrant workers in Arizona. The new law makes it even more likely that migrant workers, legal ones and undocumented ones, will go to other states.
That matters. Banks consider the availability of labor when they make loans to farmers. If farmers face labor shortages, they plant less, Sigg says.
If agriculture can't find labor, "agriculture will move" out of state or out of the country, he says.
A lot of other jobs will disappear, too, because workers don't just work. Workers buy groceries, clothing, televisions, furniture and cars. Workers rent apartments. They go out to eat and see movies. Workers, even undocumented ones, keep the economy going.
Consider: Under the employer-sanctions law, prosecutors have to check out complaints from anyone - even a disgruntled employee or competitor. The potential disruption from what Sigg calls "drive-by, anonymous complaints" creates a perilous environment for business. Entrepreneurs notwithstanding, business thrives on certainty and stability.
Arizona's employer-sanctions law is a problem. So is an even harsher initiative that is being shopped around the state.
A solution to illegal immigration has to come from Congress, and it has to recognize that the undocumented immigrants currently in this country are an integral part of the economy. Arizona's employer-sanctions law is a cheap trick with the depth of a bumper sticker and the precision of a land mine. Unless it is struck down in court, it will hurt the state's growth and economy.
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