Well, you'd have to do a formal analysis to know for sure, but given that illegals are practically willing to work for nothing, and that fines are bounded from above by political considerations, intuitively it seems to me that you'd have to have to spot check a very high number of establishments to bring make the expected value of hiring illegals negative. That would make it very costly. We're talking billions a year, I figure. I could be wrong, though, and if you have done the formal analysis, I'd love to see it.
You have the added problem that drivers liscences and birth certificates or social security cards are easy to forge, so even employers who are trying to comply are going to have a hard time weeding out the illegals.
My alternative would not cost very much. You'd have to spend some money to increase the number of passport offices and increase state department staff, but I figure $10-20 million would do the trick. You'd also have to merge the INS, passport, and social security databases, but that would be cheap. A couple million. With this system you'd get the added benefit of better airline security, less tax evasion, and less money laundering (if passports are required for opening bank accounts).
If it's done right, the inconvenience to citizens would be minimal. You go in person to get a passport once in your adult life (and one other time as a kid, maybe). Then you renew every ten years by mail. Or even if you had to renew in person, doing it once every ten yeras is not a big deal.
Ah, ah, ah -- you don't get to apply different standards to the two proposals on the table.
Inasmuch as your proposal is absolutely ruled out by political considerations (no politician who wants to keep his job is going to touch it with a ten-foot pole), you can't turn around and selectively apply it as a limiting factor to alternative options.
intuitively it seems to me that you'd have to have to spot check a very high number of establishments to bring make the expected value of hiring illegals negative
Not really. Given the fact that the problem is concentrated in the low-skill end of the labor market (so that citizens wouldn't be paid all that much even if there were no illegal competition), and illegals have to be paid at least a bare subsistence (for obvious reasons), it's not that difficult to get that "expected value" up to the relatively small difference between the two.
You have the added problem that drivers liscences and birth certificates or social security cards are easy to forge
So what exactly do you propose should be used as proof of identity to obtain a passport?
I gotta ask: Did you manage to keep a straight face while typing in the assertion that it costs about ten cents to process a passport application?