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.

> no different

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.

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.