How do you know that your proposal would make the economy more unfriendly to Hispanics? Each time a business hires a citizen or legal immigrant, document fraud imposes a probability that you actually hire an illegal immigrant. If you raise the cost of accidentally hiring an illegal immigrant, you raise the cost of trying to hire a legal worker who looks similar to a population that stereotypically contains illegal immigrants.<p>Would that have an impact on the behavior of a rational business? Let&#x27;s do some math, admitting that this is kinda a Fermi problem.<p>So if you are running a limited-service restaurant that employs poor people,  and you have an employee working a 40-hr workweek at 7.35&#x2F;hr, their yearly pay is $15,288. On top of that, you have an additional 15.3% ($2,329.88) [1] to pay for the employer&#x27;s portion of social security and Medicare tax, $420 for unemployment tax[2], and employer portion of federal income taxes[3] of 10% on the first $11.525 ($922.50) and $15 on the rest ($555.45). And payroll for that employee costs $19,455.83. For a limited service restaurant, payroll overall costs 25%-30%[4] of gross revenue. So (making the unjustified simplifying assumption that revenue comes from employees roughly proportional to their payroll costs.) for each such employee, the business makes $64,852.78-$77,823.34 in net revenue per employee. Or, $45,396.94-$58,367.50 in revenue per employee after payroll but before other cost (goods, equipment, utilities, rent, etc) which we will all assume are fixed. So, if a business is risk-neutral, all costs other than labor don&#x27;t effect decision-making, and we don&#x27;t account for the possibility of going out of business then your policy is a bad idea if the probability of accidentally hiring an illegal immigrant and getting caught is 4.54%-5.84%.<p>What is the probability of hiring an illegal immigrant if a business hires someone who, to them, looks Hispanic?<p>If there are 11 million[5] illegal immigrants in the US. Let&#x27;s say 7.35 million[6] of them are Hispanic&#x2F;Latino in appearance (I&#x27;m talking about racial discrimination here, so the diversity of Hispanic peoples gets reduced to one question: Does a business owner think they &quot;look Hispanic&quot;?). One source[7], whose neutrality I doubt, claims that 75% of illegal immigrants have forged documents like social security cards. It would make sense that they would want to obtain documents that allow them to work, so lets assume that&#x27;s true. So than means 5.5 million Hispanic people with forged documents. There are 55 million[8] Hispanic people living in the U.S. That means that 10% of them are people with forged employment documents. Accounting for the fact that illegal immigrants are more likely to be in the low-income workforce than Hispanic citizens, it&#x27;s probably higher.<p>What is the probability of getting caught? I&#x27;m on a phone and too tired to continue this calculation and I&#x27;m on my phone. But if it was 0.45-0.58, then it would be prohibitively expensive for a risk-neutral rational business whose only cost was labor to hire someone who looked Hispanic. That sounds to like economic conditions that are unfavorable to poor Hispanic people.<p>Of course, you could fix this by adding a Mens Rea component to your proposal.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;pub&#x2F;irs-pdf&#x2F;p15.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.irs.gov&#x2F;pub&#x2F;irs-pdf&#x2F;p15.pdf</a>, page 31<p>[2] ibid, page 35<p>[3] ibid, page 46<p>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smallbusiness.chron.com&#x2F;percentage-should-restaurant-spend-payroll-24851.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smallbusiness.chron.com&#x2F;percentage-should-restaurant-...</a><p>[5] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;24&#x2F;5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;24&#x2F;5-facts-abou...</a><p>[6] ibid: 5.9 million from Mexico; pulled out of my ass: 1.45 million from elsewhere in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. I&#x27;m fudging the fact that there are black people and white people from those regions. Better numbers welcomed.<p>[7] I doubt it&#x27;s neutrality but it does make sense that illegal immigrants would want forged documents. How hard it is to counterfeit? I don&#x27;t know. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cis.org&#x2F;IdentityTheft" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cis.org&#x2F;IdentityTheft</a><p>[8] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;u-s-hispanic-population-growth-surge-cools&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;u-s-hispanic...</a>