The big problem is they only tried to enforce it along the border so the illegals went north. When they worked in border towns they went home to see their families regularly but once off the border they wanted their families with them.
Other businesses, including agricultural employers, have found workarounds to the conundrum of hiring or subcontracting illegal labor by means of existing programs for bringing in nonimmigrant workers to do the jobs, usually for less money than would be paid citizens or resident aliens. In some of these programs, the employers even gain tax breaks for this method of filling jobs. (See here and here.)
The programs seem to be sufficiently profitable for companies that, in the most egregious cases, corporations including Disney and Southern California Edison have fired American workers while making them train their foreign replacements in order to receive severance packages. One suspects that iconic American geniuses Thomas Edison and Walt Disney must have rolled over in their graves at this hijacking of their legacies in favor of corporate bottom lines.
In almost every instance involving the routine use of foreign labor to displace American workers, the employer's motive is the same: cheap, pliable labor. The general notion among employers has been that the aliens will work for less; they are unlikely to object to hazardous or unsanitary conditions or inordinately long hours because they are accustomed to such work circumstances at home; they are unlikely to pursue collective bargaining; and they don't always know when they are being cheated of overtime or denied prevailing wage rates.
Only when it became apparent the the government was not going to enforce the employer provisions apprehensions began to skyrocket.
E-Verify is the most essential element of border security which is why the GOPe will not pass it.
It makes me so sick to see America being sold out like this by the people we trusted and put into office.
“Pliable” foreign labor is a critical part of this scam.
The ultimate goal for most of the Asian Indian software engineers with H-1B visas is to obtain a USA Green Card.
In most cases they need a USA employer to sponsor their Green Card applications.
Thus, when their American employers demand high productivity and long hours, none of the H-1Bs complain.