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Calif. Fence Firm Faces Criminal Charges

By ELLIOT SPAGAT Thursday, December 14, 2006

SAN DIEGO - A Southern California fence-building company and two of its executives will be charged amid a long-running criminal investigation into whether the company knowingly hired illegal immigrants, officials said Wednesday.

Golden State Fence Co. was scheduled to be arraigned on criminal charges Thursday in San Diego, said Christine Friedman, a clerk for U.S. District Judge Barry Ted Moskowitz. Also being arraigned were Melvin Kay, Golden State's president and founder, and Michael McLaughlin, another company executive.

It is extremely rare for a company to be criminally charged with hiring illegal immigrants, said Steven Camarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., a group that advocates tighter immigration controls.

"You have show a kind of criminal conspiracy," said Camarota. "The mere hiring of illegals is not enough."

Golden State, which is based in Riverside and has at least six other offices in Southern California, declined to comment on the investigation. The company said last month that it enrolled in a voluntary federal program to verify workers' immigration status in December 2005 and encouraged other fencing companies to do the same to create "a level playing field in the industry."

Federal immigration authorities audited Golden State's employee records in 1999 and launched a criminal investigation after a second audit in 2004. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said last year that 100 employees at the company's Riverside office were unauthorized to work, including three who the company had been ordered not to employ after the 1999 audit.

Golden State, which currently employs 750 people, saw sales soar from $60 million in 1998 to $150 million in 2004, according to a biography of Kay provided by the company. Among its projects: construction of part of a 14-mile border fence in San Diego in the late 1990s.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)