Only 11 employers and no businesses were prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens over American citizens for U.S. jobs last year, federal data finds.
Although President Donald Trump’s administration has increased interior immigration enforcement by increasing the total number of arrests and deportations of illegal aliens — results that have lifted the wages of millions of working and middle-class Americans — little-to-no progress has been made in terms of increasing the prosecution of businesses and employers that knowingly hire illegal aliens over American citizens.
Federal data obtained by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University reveals that while Trump has tightened the labor market via more arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants, U.S. employers and businesses continue to largely get away with illegal hiring practices.
Between April 2018 through March 2019, for instance, only 11 employers were prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens over Americans. In the last year, no businesses were prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens.
Of those 11 employers prosecuted, only three of them received prison time.
“Not only are few employers prosecuted, fewer who are convicted receive sentences that amount to more than token punishment,” TRAC analysts explained. “Prison sentences are rare.”
These low prosecution rates for employers and businesses that knowingly hire illegal immigrants for U.S. jobs over American citizens are similar to that of the majority of the prosecution rates by the Bush and Obama administrations.
In the overwhelming majority of years since 1986, prosecutions of employers and businesses for hiring illegal aliens have not exceeded 15 total prosecutions. In the later years of the Bush administration, mostly in 2005 and early 2006, there were 20 prosecutions of employers.
Likewise, in the first years of the Obama administration, it became common for more than 15 employers hiring illegal aliens to be prosecuted, and in one year, more than 25 employers were prosecuted.
Since Trump’s inauguration, however, fewer than 15 employers have been prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens each year.
The continuously low prosecution rates of employers hiring illegal aliens stand in stark contrast to the fact that nearly eight million illegal aliens are illegally employed in the U.S. workforce — increasing foreign competition against American workers and driving down wages — as of 2016, according to Pew Research Center analysis.
About 24 percent of farm industry jobs are held by illegal aliens, 15 percent of construction industry jobs are held by illegal aliens, and eight percent of production industry jobs, which includes the meatpacking industry, manufacturing industry, and textile industry, are held by illegal aliens.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.