This sort of thing is a time-honored tactic to keep labor cheap and compliant: demonize an entire group through pointing to a sub-set, and punish the lowly. This way the workers are too afraid to make waves, and thankful to get any minimal pay.
Quote: Academic studies estimate that unscrupulous employers in New York City keep an extra billion dollars a year by defying New York State’s weak labor law and cheating timorous and ill-informed immigrant workers.
Ms. Toribio was both when she arrived from the Dominican Republic 10 years ago. But she evolved into a word-of-mouth investigator and organizer for the Make the Road New York community group. The organization has successfully worked with committed state inspectors to wring wage-theft judgments against scores of employers — $28,000 for a gouged fruit-stand peddler, $70,000 for 99-cent store workers, $400,000 from moguls squeezing the payroll at a sneaker chain.
New York needs a strong labor law like Arizona’s. Arizona is rightly notorious for its abusive anti-immigrant law. But its labor law seriously penalizes employers who retaliate against outspoken workers, and it provides confidentiality for whistleblowers and faster, bigger damages for employers who ignore wage-theft judgments. A bill to toughen New York’s law awaits action by the Legislature, which is in its closing days, when the good and the ugly elbow for attention.
Editorial Notebook - The Cheap Cost of Cheating the Lowest Paid - NYTimes.com
Any law aimed at illegal immigration must punish those employers who hire these workers, and punish them severely enough that they have incentive to stop. Then there is a level playing field between the law-abiding businesses and the sharp operators, with an end result of some sort of more-sensible compromise.
The effect in Arizona seems to be a greater division of 'natives' getting the full protection of minimum wage law, and the even greater exploitation of 'illegals'.