ICE Raids are bad news for Business (but not why you think!)

So this article right here was the most shared article this past week on the Wall Street Journal's website, uh, and it was super interesting to me, so I flagged it. Uh, what's interesting is that the Trump administration, which is coming in this week, uh, into power, uh, has announced to everyone that they plan to go and instruct the ICE department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to go out and do raids. In Chicago to look for illegal immigrants and shut them down and deport them. Well, it's interesting because, well, ICE is basically like an enforcement arm. In other words, the police. And when was the last time the police gave everybody an advance week's notice that they were going to be coming out and doing a raid? Well, it's super interesting and it has a lot to tell us about what's going on with small business, immigration, illegal workers, and how you and me as entrepreneurs are ping-pongs in this whole fight, uh, as people try to figure out how we're going to staff American businesses and how we're going to deal with immigrants coming into this country. So talk about how it all came together and what it means for you and me running businesses in this video. Hey, my name is Michael Girdley. If you're new here, uh, I am a business nerd. I love to take walks and talk about the world of business with the hopes that I can help other people who are getting on the same journey I've been on, which is being a CEO and a business owner and an entrepreneur for going on 30 years now. So, uh, if you're new here, please subscribe. Also, please subscribe to my newsletter, uh, so I can spam you with emails. Uh, both are in my bio here. So how we got to where we are today, uh, actually ties back to kind of the 9/11, post-9/11 era, uh, when the Department of Homeland Security was created, uh, and they took the old INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and they rolled it into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. And that all happened back in 2003. And ICE was created, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And today that whole department has grown to employ about 20,000 people, 400 offices, and basically ICE's job is to identify illegal immigrants, illegals here in the US, detain them, and then hopefully, well, send them back to where they came from. And ICE's budget is around $8 billion, 20,000 people, and it's designed, well, basically to protect the interior of the United States and the integrity of our borders. So for kind of the first decade of its existence, ICE, well, did its job. And underneath the Obama administration back in 2014, that's when kind of the deportation of illegal migrants peaked under the Obama administration, you know, at about 350,000 deportees per year. But then something changed. By 2023, ICE was deporting less than half that number of people. So it went from 350,000 a year to about 175,000 a year in terms of illegal immigrants caught and then, well, sent back to where they came from. And so kind of if you look at it, it's pretty interesting. What changed with ICE's mission is it's a pretty hard mission. There's only 20,000 ICE, like, staff members worldwide. And to put that in perspective, the total number of sworn police officers and peace officers in the United States is nearly 1.3 million. In other words, the percentage of police officers sworn to, well, basically deport illegal immigrants is 0.000125 of the total number of police here in the United States. It's a small, it's a small number for a pretty darn big job. And so you fast forward to 2019, and that was under the administration of the very first President Trump presidency. And he also at that time did some very, well, kind of public deportation activities like this where folks from ICE and other law enforcement agencies at the federal government level would go out and try to basically, you know, do mass raids. And the last one, and I'll blank it on the name of it, something stupid like Operation Eagle Freedom or something like that, that's the way these things are always named, went out with the idea of doing raids across the U.S. with the goal of identifying 2,000 illegal workers, undocumented, and sending them back to where they came from. Well, that organization and that activity resulted in a net total of 35 deportations of illegal workers in the United States. And when you put that in perspective of the estimates, which by the way, nobody knows exactly how many illegal workers there are in the United States, but when you look at the estimates of the number of legal workers, which is between 6 and 11 million, it's not really gonna make much of a difference despite how cool, you know, Operation Eagle Freedom is or whatever it was called. So at a first glance, like, well, if I own a small business, and I'm complying with the laws, all this sounds pretty good, right? Who needs to have a very big ICE department coming out and auditing my I-9 forms and all that kind of stuff to make sure my entire workforce is legal? But like many things in the government, when they underinvest in enforcement, they put that enforcement onto you and me as small business owners. An example of this happening happened in 2023 in Florida. When there was the grand idea there to have harsher penalties for illegal immigrants working in the various industries in that particular state. So instead of hiring more enforcement officers at a state level, basically what they did was pass a bill in 2023 making it harder for you and me as business owners to be in compliance. We had to do a lot more reporting and we had to use the federal government's E-Verify system, We had to change what kind of identifications we could use to prove somebody was a legal worker inside the US. And again, this theme, like, it's supposed to be something that the government is enforcing the rules, but when they don't want to hire more folks to do the enforcement, they basically put the onus on you and me. And when this Florida bill was passed, they actually predicted like a mass disruption of the workforce in the state of Florida. And if you look at where undocumented workers tend to congregate, they congregate in pretty specific industries. They end up a lot in construction, a lot in farm work, and they end up a lot in hospitality. And there was kind of this idea that, oh, we're going to do a massive disruption of these industries if we have this more stringent, you know, stringent rules for businesses in the state of Florida. But the interesting thing is very little changed. And what happened is Interestingly enough, folks found ways to basically legally comply when, say, undocumented workers left their employment. So a good example is a lot of the farm work that goes on in Florida. Well, they were able to go, and when workers kind of disappeared when this new enforcement came in, they were able to replace those with folks under, say, the H-2A visa program and stuff like that. And also folks who were basically getting in legally into the country, but because of, well, basically their countries being ones that were allowed in, right? Cuba and Haiti and folks like that, when refugees could get in and be complying with the law. And look, there's a big problem with undocumented labor and it keeps getting worse and worse by the year because of two things. One is our labor market is incredibly tight here in the US. Some industries like construction, hospitality, farm work, like they are struggling and totally desperate to get people willing and wanting to do those jobs. Secondarily, a lot of those industries like farm work, construction, hospitality, and that sort of thing, like, they have more than 10% of their workers, uh, in— by some measures, uh, are undocumented folks. So when you have that kind of situation and you go to somebody in construction or hospitality and say, hey, we're going to turn over 10% of your workforce or more, like, that potentially creates a nightmare scenario for those industries where, well, they may just not be able to function anymore at all. And so the government, by unfortunately kicking the can on immigration, uh, for, well, decade after decade, has created a problem, right, where we have these industries that are entirely dependent on these types of workers. And whether anybody wants to appreciate it or not, like, shutting it off like a light and really doing something about immigration would be devastating for those industries. And in researching this video, like, I actually went through to try to figure out, well, are small businesses more likely to hire illegal are bigger businesses going to do it? Like, what percentage of people are using phony-ed-up kind of identification to get these jobs? And here's the funny thing: the data absolutely sucks. Like, nobody really knows the extent, uh, or how much people are employing undocumented workers. Where are they located? What types of things are they doing? Is it big businesses, small businesses? Like, the data absolutely blows, um, which is really an interesting thing given how much this particular topic shows up in the political discourse. Uh, and an interesting thing about the Florida bill from 2023 is showing us how difficult it's actually going to be to get anything done to reverse kind of the mess that's been created with, well, this amount of undocumented workers. The Florida bill basically got almost shut down and finally did get totally watered down by a coalition of business interests and actually church groups. That didn't want to see what was going to happen to these small businesses, uh, if there was just these ridiculous and onerous requirements put onto people trying to just make a living and run their businesses in the right way. But what did survive in that Florida bill was a bunch of, well, extra work for small businesses. It was really easy for the legislature to put more paperwork in front of people that are already dying under mountains of paperwork just trying to run businesses and feed their families. And that leads us to where we are today, which is, you know, new presidents coming in, uh, talking about immigration and, uh, doing, well, pretty much performative stuff that's really not going to make a big difference in the grand scheme of things, especially when ICE is only 20,000, you know, 20,000 officers big, uh, and there are millions of small business people, uh, that are doing the job of trying to make sure, well, they employ the right type of people and do it legally. And so for the rest of us, well, if you're an entrepreneur, it's yet another thing to worry about besides making payroll and taking care of your people and taking care of your customers. The government will continue to give us more paperwork to fill out, which, you know me, I love paperwork, and so do you.