Federal immigration officials will greatly expand enforcement against unscrupulous employers of illegal immigrants during 2018, says Thomas Homan, director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

“I actually just recently looked at how much time, what percentage of time is spent by Homeland Security Investigations [on] worksite enforcement [and] I just gave the instruction I want to increase that by four to five times,” Homan told an audience at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday morning. He continued:

So we’re taking worksite enforcement very hard this year. Regarding the increased number of inspections and worksite operations, you are going to see us significantly increase this next fiscal year. We’re doing it differently than we’ve done it. Now we’re going to prosecute the employers who knowingly harbor the illegal aliens, we are going to detain and remove the [aliens].

The renewed visits are a sharp change from official practice under President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, both of whom minimized investigation and prosecutions of employers who hired illegals instead of Americans. In fact, under Obama, several American companies were fined for requiring job-applicants to provide good evidence that they were eligible to work.

Homan’s renewed focus on employers will likely face intense pushback from business interests, and especially from the low-tech dairy and fruit-picking industries. Both industries have declined to invest in labor-saving technology so they can profit from using low-wage illegal immigrants and temporary H-2A guest-workers.

The announcement marks a renewed effort by President Donald Trump’s deputies to enforce the nation’s immigration laws and to implement his Inauguration Day promise of “Buy American, Hire American.” But it is not clear whether Homan’s policy is fully backed by Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen.

This is a very interesting promise; workforce enforcement's been the one place where ICE hasn't radically stepped up under Trump so far https://t.co/1ds09P6N3A — Dara Lind (@DLind) October 17, 2017

In recent weeks, federal officials have wrapped up cases against a dairy and an arborist company for hiring illegals.

In September, the Asplundh Tree Expert Co. agreed to pay a $95 million fine for hiring illegals. However, that fine is a small payment for a 30,000-person company with revenues of $3.5 billion per year. According to a federal statement:

from 2010 until December 2014, Asplundh, an industry leader in tree trimming and brush clearance for power and gas lines, hired and rehired employees in many regions in the United States accepting identification documents it knew to be false and fraudulent. A six-year HSI audit and investigation revealed that the company decentralized its hiring so Sponsors (the highest levels of management) could remain willfully blind while Supervisors and General Foremen (2nd and 3rd level supervisors) hired ineligible workers, including unauthorized aliens, in the field. Hiring was by word of mouth referrals rather than through any systematic application process. This manner of hiring enabled Supervisors and General Foremen to hire a work force that was readily available and at their disposal. This decentralized model tacitly perpetuated fraudulent hiring practices that, in turn, maximized productivity and profit. With a motivated work force, including unauthorized aliens willing to be relocated and respond to weather related events around the nation, Asplundh had crews which were easily mobilized that enabled them to dominate the market. Asplundh provided all the incentives to managers to skirt immigration law.

But three company managers pled guilty to felony charges, said another statement.

Asplundh supervisors accepted identification documents, such as legal permanent resident cards (green cards), Social Security Cards, and drivers’ licenses as evidence of authorized status or employment in the United States, knowing that those identification documents were illegitimate. This facilitated the hiring and rehiring of workers that were not eligible to be employed in the United States. Asplundh management delegated the recruitment and hiring of employees to lower level supervisors and decentralized its hiring practices in order to facilitate the hiring of these ineligible workers. Three individual Asplundh supervisors, including a Vice-President, have already entered pleas of guilty to felony counts of conspiracy to commit fraud and misuse visas and fraud and misuse of visas in connection with this case.

In August, the owner of a dairy company pled guilty, according to another government statement.

Michael Thomas Millenkamp, 47, of Earlville, Iowa, was convicted on one count of harboring, encouraging and inducing aliens to reside unlawfully in the United States … In a plea agreement, Millenkamp admitted that between 2007 and 2011, he employed several illegal aliens at his business, Mike Millenkamp Dairy Cattle. Some of his illegal alien employees were permitted to reside at one or more farms owned by Millenkamp. Court records even show he admitted to friends that he was committing this crime … As part of his plea agreement, Millenkamp also agreed to pay a total financial sanction of $250,000 to the United States, and to make at least two public presentations to statewide farm groups to bring awareness to his case … Millenkamp faces a possible maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment, a $250,000 fine, a $100 in special assessment, and three years of supervised release following any imprisonment.

A local newspaper reported:

Court records allege Mike Millenkamp Dairy Cattle employed 38 different people between 2007 and 2011 but usually only had four people on staff at any one time. At least five of the workers were in the United States illegally. Sixteen of the workers had submitted Social Security numbers that were never issued or didn’t correspond with the names given, and 11 submitted alien registration numbers with the same problems, court records state.

Homan noted that the migrants will continue to break the nation’s immigration laws if companies offer them jobs. He said:

Unless you remove the magnets, as long as they think they can come here and have a U.S.-citizen kid and not get removed, they are going to keep coming. As long as they can get a job, they are going to try and come. So we are stepping up worksite enforcement.

Watch the question and answer here:

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But business groups have used their political power to tilt the labor market in their favor, via the federal policy of importing 1 million consumers and workers each year. The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals. Universities employ roughly 100,000 foreign guest workers.

That Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.

Americans tell pollsters that they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most Americans also want to favor legal immigrants, and many sympathize with illegals.

Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a growing percentage of the nation’s annual income is shifting to investors and away from employees. The business-funded Hamilton Project suggests that the shift is transferring $1 trillion per year from 160 million employees to the nation’s investors.