Thread: Businesses fear immigration reform changes could hurt

http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll ... 90350/1046

Article published Jun 29, 2006
Businesses fear immigration reform changes could hurt
Some say verifying status will be too hard
By CATHERINE TSAI
The Associated Press

DENVER - When Country Lane Wholesale Nursery hires someone new, the Franktown business checks an applicant's identification and sends an I-9 employment form to the federal government.

It can take as long as nine months to hear whether the documents are bad, Country Lane general manager Tom Halverstadt said.

Beginning next week, Colorado lawmakers will consider plans that could require employers to verify whether their workers are in the country legally or else lose the right to deduct their salaries on their taxes.

Enacting such a requirement without providing a way to immediately check applicants' status is causing concern for some businesses. Other critics worry about ethnic discrimination and a loss of workers to states without the same requirements.

"You can't just put it on the back of employers when the government doesn't have a system in place to verify whether documents are fraudulent," said Chuck Berry, president of the Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry. "Once a system is in place, a vast majority of employers are anxious to comply."

Berry said many business owners agree sanctions are in order for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Yet verifying citizenship status isn't easy.

Greeley-based Swift & Co. has been using a government pilot program that confirms whether Social Security numbers are valid. One shortcoming may be the program's ability to detect when two people are trying to use the same number, spokesman Sean McHugh said.

Employers are advised not to dismiss someone based on an incorrect Social Security number - leaving firms in a bind for keeping that worker on the payroll, said Sharon Harris, executive director of the Colorado Nursery and Greenhouse Association.

"We want secure borders. We also want to have a documented work force that is sustainable," Harris said. "This is a federal issue. We really don't believe this is something the states need to be spending time and taxpayer money on."

The Association of Landscape Contractors of Colorado also believes the issue is best left to the federal government.

"What I worry about is (that) Colorado is going to make tougher rules than other states and part of the work force will leave," Halverstadt said. "It's my feeling businesses will lose a large percentage of our employees, everywhere from the service industry to the green industry."

During the regular legislative session earlier this year, Colorado Restaurant Association officials said they were not convinced an employee verification system would work. Association President Peter Meersman said current law requires businesses to verify employment based on paperwork and documents that can be forged.

The restaurant association supports a guest-worker program with a path toward citizenship. It is pushing for an accurate and inexpensive method for determining immigration status.

The Colorado Association of Home Builders is drafting a policy on the issue and had no immediate comment Wednesday. Colorado Ski Country USA, the group representing resorts in the nation's No. 1 ski state, declined to comment until officials can review details of proposed legislation.

Harold Lasso, policy and program development director for Denver's Centro Humanitario Para Lost Trabajadores ("The Humanitarian Center for Workers"), said the proposed compromise looks like it will hurt everyone - immigrants, corporations and American workers.

"This is going to lead to a lot of profiling. It's going to lead to a lot of citizens who are not white and don't look like 'an American' to have to answer a lot of questions and provide a lot of additional documents," Lasso said.

And if American citizens are forced to produce extra documents to appease nervous employers, Lasso said, there will be no shortage of discrimination lawsuits.

The cost of verifying workers' legal status may lead some companies to cover the expense by offering lower wages and fewer benefits for all workers, he said.

Halverstadt predicted that tougher immigration rules could affect many industries.

Country Lane starts its employees well above minimum wage at $8 to $9 an hour, yet its help-wanted newspaper ads sometimes go unanswered.

"If I try to get an 18-year-old kid and try to put a shovel in his hand, he'll last two days," Halverstadt said. "We have a problem of availability of labor as it is. There's more work than there are true United States-born citizens who can do the work."

These people don't care what it costs "we the people" to subsidize these illegal immigrants as long as they have cheap labor, slide out of workmans' comp and taxes, then whine when they have to adhere to the law. Really breaks my heart.

"You can't just put it on the back of employers when the government doesn't have a system in place to verify whether documents are fraudulent,"

Absolute lie. There is a system in place in all 50 states.

The resulting document verification system is called the Basic Pilot program. Within three working days of hiring a new employee, a participating employer electronically submits a new employee’s Social Security number, name, and birth date to the Social Security Administration (SSA) to be checked against its database. If the employee is foreign-born, the data is also sent to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—previously to the INS—to verify that the new employee is in a legal work status, e.g. immigrant, temporary worker, or refugee. Within a few days, a response comes back indicating either that the employee has been identified and is authorized to work, or that authorization cannot be made. In the latter case, the employee must be informed and is given eight work days to contact the SSA and/or the DHS to reconcile any incorrect data in the agency’s database. If the discrepancy is not reconciled after ten days, the employer is notified that the employee is not authorized to work. The employer then must either terminate the employee or become subject to sanctions for knowingly employing an illegal alien, unless it can be proven that the government erred.

This verification system is modeled on a program called SAVE, used by state and local governmental agencies that administer federal welfare programs. Those agencies have been required since 1986 to verify with immigration authorities that recipients of federal welfare benefits are not illegal aliens.[1] The Basic Pilot verification program for employers is run by the same office that administers the SAVE program.[2]

When the Basic Pilot program was first established in November 1997, it was limited to employers in California, New York, Texas, New Jersey, and Florida. As a result of a request from the Nebraska congressional delegation, it was later expanded to include that state. In 1999, the INS contracted for an outside evaluation of the program.[3] That evaluation, completed in June 2002, found that the employers participating in the program were satisfied with its operation and that it was achieving its objective with only minor drawbacks.

In November 2003, Congress reauthorized the project for an additional five years and expanded its scope to be available to employers nationwide over the next year. The legislation also called on the DHS to submit a report on how it planned to expand the project to the additional states and on what steps it has taken to address the drawbacks identified in the evaluation report.
“Since its inception, the voluntary Basic Pilot Program has provided a ‘safe harbor’ for employers in the complicated and often confusing area of employment verification. While the law requires employers to verify documents for each hire that indicate authorization to work, the complexity of documents, the ease of forgeries and counterfeiting and the steep penalties against inquiring too far and violating a legitimate worker’s civil rights make this area a potential quagmire for unsuspecting employers. The Basic Pilot allows employers to quickly and easily check with immigration and social security databases to verify eligibility. Many employers rely on this system to fulfill their legal obligations.” --R. Bruce Josten, Executive Vice President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, October 17, 2003