Thread: Ariz. starts its employer sanctions 'experiment'

Ariz. starts its employer sanctions 'experiment'
Many are watching to see if law affects illegal entry
By Brady McCombs
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 01.01.2008
The rest of the nation will be watching Arizona starting today as a new employer-sanctions law dubbed the nation's toughest and most wide-reaching goes into effect.
Under the Legal Arizona Workers Act, businesses that knowingly hire illegal entrants could face a business-license suspension of up to 10 days on a first offense and lose that license for a second offense.
The law — signed by Gov. Janet Napolitano on July 2 after gaining approval from the Legislature — is the first of its kind in the United States. Tennessee has a similar law that takes effect today, and Oklahoma will implement one in July.
"What Arizona will become is a natural experiment," said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank that advocates for comprehensive immigration changes. "In effect, we will be testing everything we are having an argument about and see if a state can, indeed, regulate immigration by sanctioning employers."
Proponents say the law will force illegal entrants to move elsewhere, reducing the costs incurred by schools, hospitals and the criminal justice system. Opponents counter that it will cripple the Arizona economy by eliminating a valuable work force and result in some employers relocating.
The law will give Arizona, and the rest of the country, an opportunity to determine the actual costs and benefits of illegal immigration, he said. It will also test if the federal government's E-verify system, which employers will be required to use, can handle the extra load.
And perhaps most important, it will reveal whether the country has the political will to follow through with the tough law, which could cause major hardships to businesses and the economy, Papademetriou said.
"It's a brand-new world that we are entering, and we'll see how much stomach we have for this," said Papademetriou, who co-founded the institute and studies international migration. "This is unprecedented anywhere in the world."
Traditionally, employers have largely been left alone by federal authorities who spend most of their resources on trying to catch illegal entrants as they cross the border while devoting only a fraction of the resources to investigating employers within the country.
In fiscal year 2007, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported 92 criminal arrests of company supervisors, an increase from the previous three years but still statistically insignificant considering there are 6 million companies that employ more than 7 million illegal entrants, according to several analysts.
That strategy is starting to change though, albeit with baby steps such as Arizona's new law, he said. The law will provide an opportunity to see if employer sanctions are feasible and effective on a much-smaller scale.
"We now have a natural experiment, and we are going to see how it plays out economically, politically, socially and culturally," Papademetriou said. "The whole country is watching because what Arizona did is go to the very heart of the argument, which is to see if this is all about employment and work."
More immigration stories are at azstarnet.com/border
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Anyone in Arizona that can give us some periodic feedback on how things are going down there in the next several weeks? It'll be interesting to see, how much and what kind of changes take place in the business arena in the upcoming weeks. (TIAs in advance).

Opponents counter that it will cripple the Arizona economy by eliminating a valuable work force and result in some employers relocating.

Translation -- "Providing opportunities for Americans to start new businesses."