What should Home Depot be doing? They don’t control the administration or the ICE raids. Forcing day laborers off the property ensures less raids happen on the property—I haven’t really understood the boycotts.
Home Depot put up the cameras to deal with organized crime, both theft and gift-card fraud. Flock specifically advertises that Home Depot put up the cameras to deal with gift card fraud:
> The Home Depot leveraged Flock Safety’s technology to close a case involving a multi-state gift card tampering ring, resulting in fraud and property theft charges exceeding $300,000. This type of success underscores how powerful connected data can be in mitigating fraud risks. [0]
Aside from that, Home Depot has been dealing with massive, multi-state, organized theft campaigns. Earlier this month, NY prosecutors lodged 780 counts of theft against thirteen suspects who stole millions of dollars of merchandise from Home Depot stores in nine states [1].
You wanna prevent gift card fraud? Stop selling gift cards.
Gift cards are a huge fraud vehicle by their nature. Home Depot is just noticing because it fraud against them, rather than the more usual money laundering for scams. Retailers turn a bit of a blind eye, since they make so much money from gift cards that never get used or end up with leftover balances. But really gift cards are an attractive nuisance, and add no value for the (non-sucker) consumer.
And the cameras will have small effectiveness after the first few arrests anyway. "Don't let the LPR catch your car" just becomes part of the tradecraft for these organized operations. Whereas sporadic, opportunistic, individualized ripoffs won't create much of a signature in the LPR stream.
It is really no different than having drug dealers set up shop on your corner and sharing footage with police. You have people who are likely committing criminal activity (multiple crimes in the day laborer case) and are sharing footage with the relevant authorities.
The politicization of enforcement doesn’t change that as a business owner I would not want to own the location people facilitate illegal transactions.
In your world view immigrants working jobs you find beneath you is the same as someone selling drugs?
> likely committing criminal activity
You understand that exploiting day laborers to circumvent labor laws puts the, mostly civil though vanishingly rare criminal, liability on the employer rather than the employee, right?
We use laws rather than your own personal hatred of immigrants to define criminality.
I’ve done landscaping, home repair, fence construction, outdoor painting. My family still actively does. I don’t find them beneath me.
Working under the table without work authorization is actually spectacularly illegal as an employer and employee. Tax evasion is also spectacularly illegal as an individual.
Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed.
"A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
The reason it’s dead is these are completely irrelevant and you aren’t having a conversation, you’re taking a pulpit.
California does not dictate federal labor law and I’m sure that you already know that. Your arguments are bad and aggressive.
You’d have way more influence and agreement if you argued about immigration processes as a whole (“why are these people with jobs not given visas already?”) than these contrived obviously ridiculous and irrelevant excerpts.
You’re arguing with me like I won’t actually think about what you say, which is the “not the HN style” comment I gave you before. I will.
You seem to not be reading anything I’m saying. I have family that works for legally operated blue collar businesses.
The difference is engaging in criminal activity.
Your arguments are spectacularly lazy so I’ll ask you to show me where people not authorized to work in the country have no legal liability if they choose to work in the country.
I don’t really know what’s ruffled your feathers so much here, but this isn’t really how HN operates. It seems like you got a bit flustered when the “you’re a bad rich person” argument didn’t work, and now you’re just flailing wildly.
Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed.
"A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly
$100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while
many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
I always thought having day laborers chilling in Home Depot parking lots was a net positive thing for the store and a bit of an untapped potential. Companies pay a lot of money to insert themselves in the hiring stream, and here is Home Depot as the defacto meeting point for a substantial amount of economic activity. Surely a more intelligent and less frightened company could make something positive out of this.
But that's what you get with a fear-based political leadership. ICE targets day laborers not because of the horrible damage they do to the US economy, but because they have been selected as the scapegoats du jour.
How can an intelligent company make money from illegal activity in your opinion? Day laborers hang in the parking lot because they can't work legally, if they could then they could use HD's contractor portal and bid on jobs there.
Could there be a motif unrelated to ICE ? That Home Depot does not like that day labourers are loitering and approaching customers entering and leaving the store.
