"Also, employers who hire people off the books (like day laborers) aren't withholding any Social Security or Medicare taxes either."
Not just day laborers, include most of them working construction.
They pay them in cash and knowing that they are illegals a lot of them make the deductions from the cash wages and pocket the money.
The big savings to the tree trimers and construction is they aren't paying comp insurance which runs 50-100% of wages.
Address that, Congressman. Your wall is a boondoggle.
Yeah. It is pablo's fault you people in CA have the most stupid and asinine WC program in existence. Look, the loons have been running CA for so many years that they have built insane regulatory and insurance environments. It is REASONABLE to expect that business owners would seek to escape the onerous and idiotic red tape that people live under. Illegal hires are the REAL market, not the contrived and fake junk that can be propped up only by paying artisans 50K a year the way you did (you stated in an earlier post that you paid 30 dollars an hour in 1992 to your employees, plus benefits. That equals over $60,000 a year. There has never been a carpenter, hvac man, plumber, or roofer BORN who is worth that much money. You want to pay those kind of outrageous wages and then bitch when the Mexicans undercut you, then rant away.