Worksite Enforcement Works. Here’s the Record.

On Oct. 18, border czar Tom Homan told Fox News that worksite enforcement “needs to happen” and that a plan to restart it has cleared ICE’s investigations division. He summed it up this way:

“If you can’t get a job, you’re not going to come.”

The plan now sits on the Homeland Security secretary’s desk, where two earlier worksite pushes stalled after employers complained. Does worksite enforcement do what Homan says it does?

It has been tried. Between 2006 and 2018, federal agents raided or audited meatpacking plants, a transformer factory, a bakery, a restaurant chain and a janitorial contractor. Reporters went back afterward to see who was working the lines. The record answers the question.

The prediction: “They’d have to raise wages and improve the conditions.”

In December 2001, The New York Times reported on a federal indictment accusing Tyson Foods of conspiring to smuggle illegal workers into its plants. The story explained what was at stake for the industry. A generation earlier, meatpackers had earned about $18 an hour in inflation-adjusted dollars. By 2001 many started at $6.

A rural sociologist told the paper what a real crackdown would mean. “This would really cripple the system,” he said.

That was the warning. Here is what happened.

Swift, 2006

On Dec. 12, 2006, ICE agents entered six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in six states and arrested 1,297 workers. A Center for Immigration Studies review of the plants afterward found two things:

• Wages and bonuses rose about 8 percent at the plants where figures could be obtained.
• All six plants were back at full production within five months.

In Greeley, Colo., the line of applicants at the county employment office backed up to the doors two days after the raid. The office took 157 applications for Swift in a single day. The plant offered a $1,500 signing bonus.

The cost to shoppers was small. Packing-plant wages are 7 to 9 percent of the retail price of meat. A plant could raise pay by a third and the price at the counter would move 2 or 3 percent.

Who took the jobs

The plants hired Americans, and the newspapers that covered the raids said so.

At Smithfield’s hog plant in Tar Heel, N.C., more than 1,500 Hispanic workers left after a 2007 ICE action. The workforce went from about 20 percent Black to 60 percent, according to The New York Times, and in December 2008 the plant’s 5,000 workers voted in a union after a 15-year fight. A laid-off restaurant worker who applied told a reporter he expected to make $4 an hour more than he had.

At Crider Inc., a poultry plant in Stillmore, Ga., 2006 raids cost the company three-quarters of its 900 workers. Crider ran an ad in the weekly paper headed “Increased Wages,” offering $7 to $9 an hour, more than a dollar above what it had paid many of the workers who left. It added free transportation and went to the state employment office for applicants for the first time in years. The office sent 400. Crider hired about 200.

At Howard Industries in Laurel, Miss., agents arrested 592 workers at a transformer plant in August 2008. Applicants lined up for two days. One of them, Charlyn Dozier, had applied every three to six months since 2002 and had never been offered a job. She was hired after the raid. She and three other women later sued, saying the company had passed over Americans in favor of illegal workers. Howard settled for $1.3 million without admitting wrongdoing. Its personnel director pleaded guilty to knowingly hiring hundreds of illegal workers, and the company paid a $2.5 million fine.

At Cloverhill Bakery in Chicago, there was no raid. An ICE audit of hiring paperwork in 2017 found that about 800 workers had presented fake or stolen identification. The staffing agency that replaced them screened every new hire through E-Verify.

Audits do it quietly

Cloverhill was typical. In 2009, ICE audited the I-9 forms of a janitorial contractor in the Twin Cities. No one was arrested. About 1,200 janitors could not produce valid documents and were let go. The company had posted the openings ten days before the first firings, and by November its answering machine said it was no longer hiring.

Chipotle lost about 500 workers in Minnesota to an audit in 2010. When ICE sent notices of inspection to its Washington, D.C., and Virginia restaurants the next year, workers left before any agent arrived. The company switched to E-Verify. A year later its co-chief executive said the chain was “getting better people than before,” and same-store sales rose 11 percent.

Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas measured this in 2024. Across industries, employer-targeted actions such as audits and fines moved employment more than raids did.

What the economists found

Studies of the states that required E-Verify point toward better pay and job opportunities for legal workers.

• Federal Reserve economists found that U.S.-born Hispanic men, the workers most likely to compete with illegal labor, earned about 9 percent more per hour in states with a mandate.
• Less-educated native-born workers were about 2 percentage points more likely to hold a job in states with a universal mandate.
• The number of recently arrived illegal immigrants living in a mandate state fell by about a quarter.

Other studies find smaller gains or none, and the unemployment rate among those Hispanic men rose as their pay did, which the authors read as more men entering the market to look for work. In every case above, the employer raised pay, recruited locally, or both, and kept operating.

Refugees and turnover

Refugees filled some of the vacated jobs. At Swift’s plant in Cactus, Texas, and at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, resettlement agencies steered newly arrived refugees to the open jobs. Those refugees are legal workers with the same claim to a job as any citizen, and less-educated legal immigrants are often the first to gain when illegal hiring stops. Where they end up is a federal placement decision, and it says nothing about whether Americans will do the work.

Turnover among the new hires ran high at Crider and Cloverhill. Crider’s new workers were turning over at $7 to $9 an hour. At that pay, people leave.

When the employer pays enough, the workers stay.

The law

Homan’s plan lasts as long as the officials who approve it. The two earlier worksite pushes, in 2018 and in the spring of 2025, faded once employers took their complaints to the White House.

Congress banned the hiring of illegal workers in 1986 and never required employers to check. An employer who looks at a document and files a form has met the law, and the Dallas Fed economists found that enforcement actions do not push employers into E-Verify on their own. Thirty-nine years in, most hiring still runs on paper.

H.R. 251, the Legal Workforce Act, and S. 4620, the Mandatory E-Verify Act, would require every employer to run new hires through E-Verify. Employers would check every hire, and the results above would no longer depend on a raid.