03/28/2007
Legislation requires employers to verify citizenship
By: Jim Baron , Times staff writer

PROVIDENCE - Underlining the increasing importance of illegal immigration as a hot-button political issue even in a predominantly Democratic Northeast state like Rhode Island, the Senate Labor Committee took nearly 90 minutes of testimony Wednesday on a bill to require employers to use a federal data base to confirm that newly hired employees are eligible to work in this country.
The program, called Basic Pilot for the time being, is a cooperative venture of the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. It allows employers to go online and quickly - often within 10 seconds - to determine the legal status of a new hire using information they are already required to compile by law, such as name, date of birth and Social Security number or alien identification number.
The bill's sponsor, Woonsocket Sen. Marc Cote - a companion bill has been introduced in the House by Woonsocket Rep. Jon Brien - said recent news reports "have highlighted a fact that the majority of our constituents have known for some time: that there are many employers throughout our country and in this region that are intentionally violating the law by hiring aliens who are not legally authorized to work in this country. In some cases, employers are conspiring with other law breakers who participate in the underground fraudulent document industry to advance this scheme.
"These rogue employers are driven by their greed and self-interest," Cote asserted. "They take advantage of these unauthorized immigrants by hiring them at less than market labor rates, recognizing that their illegal status prevents them from pressing for fairness and equality in the labor marketplace."
The illegal hiring practices, Cote explained, suppress wages for Rhode Island's legal citizens and give the law breaking employers an unfair competitive advantage over those who abide by the law.
"This is not anti-immigrant legislation," Cote told his colleagues. "In reality, it is anti-illegal employer legislation."
Jessica Vaughn of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington DC think tank called illegal immigration "one of the most vexing public policy issues" facing the United States and said the Basic Pilot program "one of the most effective tools to foster compliance" with the law.
She said about 14,000 employers nationwide are currently using the system on a voluntary basis, just under 80 of those in Rhode Island. The object of the legislation is to make it mandatory that companies use the program before hiring new workers.
"Those opposed to this bill will try to convince you that this bill is racist and anti-immigrant," said Terry Gorman of Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement (RIILE). "Nothing could be further from the truth. The only individuals this bill affects are illegal aliens, whether they be Chinese, Irish, Italian, Latino, Russian, Polish, whatever they happen to be. It is illegal immigrants. Charlie Piscerno called Cote's legislation "a very tiny baby step in helping to slow down the illegal alien population that is coming to Rhode Island and overwhelming us one step at a time."
"This will dry up the jobs that these illegals are getting and the people here legally are not getting," said Buddy Tassoni of RIILE. "When they see that, they are going to pack up their duds and go home. That is going to take a big load off our social services, (which) will see a big drop in how much money goes out of the state."
Karen Gorman, director of RIILE, said "not only will this bill protect illegal workers from immoral employers, it will stop the avoidance of payroll taxes that are due to the state of Rhode Island that support our legal citizens who are unemployed and those that are temporarily disabled and rely on the support given to them by taxes due to the state."
The Basic Pilot bill, William Surette testified, "is the beginning of the slaying of a monster that we the people did not create and you the legislature allowed to grow and grow."
Few of the dozens of witnesses who testified Wednesday opposed the bill.
One who expressed concern was Amy Vitale of the American Civil Liberties Union Rhode Island Affiliate.
Stressing that "the ACLU does not support illegal immigration and does not support the hiring of illegal immigrants," Vitale noted that "the Social Security Administration has estimated roughly 18 million discrepancies in its record, whether it is the spelling of a name, a date of birth or the citizenship status of the individual." Ten percent of those records, she added, belong to non-citizens.






, which means they are "disproportionately being found as a tentative non-confirmation (of eligibility for employment) because of these discrepancies. She said a 2004 Department of Homeland Security evaluation said that the Social Security Administration can automatically verify "less than 50 percent" of non-citizens. So this business of an instant return is overwhelmingly not the case when a non-citizen is in question."
Also, she said, the bill "does nothing to prevent document fraud or identity theft," which would allow illegals to be approved by the Basic Pilot system.
Some employers, Vitale said, are using the system improperly to pre-screen potential employees before they are hired, so they never know the reason they were not hired was because of a finding of non-confirmation and therefore can not challenge the information that caused them to be eliminated.
Vitale later got into a give-and-take with the committee chairman, Woonsocket Sen. Roger Badeau, who asked, "so we should take this and throw it away, we should just close our eyes" to the problem of illegal immigration.
"This is not to be thought of as your magic bullet," Vitale replied. "This is not something that is going to fix everything. Even a 99 percent accuracy rate has the ability to wrongly affect 1.4 million workers."








©The Pawtucket Times 2007
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