Even a fine is absurd. There are straightforward technological solutions that might even generally decrease costs of employing people. For example, imagine that there was a special kind of money transfer called “payment for labor”: the payer would send the payee $X (via their bank), and the bank would automatically verify the immigration status of the payee, generate the correct tax records, and withhold the correct amount of money and send the withheld money to the IRS. With some sensible regulation on top, this could automatically handle unemployment, etc.

Then businesses or even individuals could hire someone for an hour, a day or a year and pay them with no friction. And the check for eligibility would be automatic. Fees could be driven to very low levels by the fact that there is no creativity whatsoever in actually implementing the transfer.

But there’s a showstopping problem here: the US economy, especially agriculture, is highly dependent on employing people illegally. So a real solution to controlling illegal employment would also require the kind of immigration reform that actually allows useful immigration, and it would require a competently run nation database of employment eligibility, and good luck getting bipartisan consensus on that.