Do laws that are difficult to enforce or prove punish honest people?

Question

I am thinking of illegal immigration and the impact it has on employers who are unwilling to accept false social security numbers or pay in cash.

I am also thinking of some of the ethical obligations imposed on lawyers like duties to disclose model rule 4.1.

Answer 1

The law is the law, people should only work if entitled too, anyone who breaks this law should be imprisoned or transported back to their own country.

Answer 2

Most laws will punish honest people (i.e. make them suffer) some of the time. That's inevitable. Laws against murder will cause suffering for the family of the murderer. That's an unfortunate side effect, but one that is considered acceptable by society.

If you turn it around and abolish immigration laws, now you have many more innocent people being punished. Not only the people who stood in line for years and paid a lot of money to get here legally, but honest people already here. You may say, well, in the 19th century we didn't have a problem with it.

There are 2 answers to that: in the 19th century, people DID come here legally, through legal channels; and laws in the 19th century were a lot different than today. If people came to this country and got sick and couldn't pay for medical care, they died: today they are treated for free. I'm not saying this isn't an improvement; what I'm saying is that those people coming in cause a much greater load on all the innocent and honest people already here.