Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee visited a factory in Iowa recently touting his Fair Tax plan as a way to level the playing field for American workers against illegal immigrants.
“One thing that does, it changes the whole idea of illegal immigration because it’s economically advantageous to pay the illegal because they can pay them less,” Huckabee said of employers who hire and pay illegal immigrants instead of American citizens.
It’s advantageous to the employer because he’s not taking out the payroll tax. If you wonder why we haven’t solved this problem, it’s because Washington doesn’t want to. The reason Washington doesn’t want to is because big business doesn’t want Washington to fix it because if they did, then a lot of people would lose a bunch of money.
Huckabee said big business would rather pay a foreign worker who isn’t paying the payroll tax that average American workers are paying “and the employer isn’t paying the payroll tax that would have been coming out of his company’s profits, so both parties of the illegal job benefit from having illegal immigration. Take that away, and you start solving illegal immigration.”
It’s not as if businesses have already figured out this loophole. In fact, the Obama Administration recently made it easier to hire foreign technology students over similarly-credentialed Americans by making them exempt from the payroll tax.
