Thread: Employer Sanctions Vital In Border Reform

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Employer Sanctions Vital In Border Reform
by David Grant and Meghan A. O'Connell
Jun 21, 2006


WASHINGTON, June 20, 2006 (UPI) -- Lawmakers are warning that any border reform law must include effective mechanisms for worksite enforcement of immigration laws or risk repeating the experience of a previous amnesty.

"If you're going to rely on the employer to figure it out it's bound to fail; it has a fundamental flaw just like the 1986 law did," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Az., said.

"In my view, there's a tipping point, and we're way away from it, but it's not impossible to reach it, and that tipping point is the point in which every business in America knows that they are likely to be audited and likely to be disciplined if they hire people illegally," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

With estimates of illegal aliens at four times the 1986 levels, Congress is again attempting to configure a policy that would stem the tide of illegal immigration and deliberating on the right balance of employer sanctions.

"We told the American people that the only way in '86 was amnesty, but the quid pro quo would be work-site verification sanctions," said Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas.

Light penalties for illegal hiring practices have made fines just another "cost of doing business" for many employers, said Richard Stana, director of homeland security and justice for the Government Accountability Office.

Stewart Baker, the assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, told senators the fine for a business that does not check an employee's documents can be as low as $110. The fine for knowingly hiring an illegal immigrant can be as low as $275 and can not exceed $2,200 for a first offence.

Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, illustrated the progress being made on the enforcement end of the issue by citing a case from March when the agency executed search, arrest and seizure warrants for three owners of a small chain of Japanese restaurants called Kawasaki.

The owners pleaded guilty to money laundering and harboring illegal aliens and agreed to forfeit $1.1 million in assets. Myers said the consequences with the previous enforcement agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, would have likely been a paperwork violations fine of a maximum of $20,000, which would probably have been negotiated down to about half that sum.

Despite her claims about its successes, in 2003 only 90 of ICE's full-time employees were devoted to worksite enforcement for all employers in the nation.

Myers said that ICE is committed to stepping up worksite enforcement efforts regardless of whether an immigration reform law is passed. Current efforts to pass a law are stalled amid opposition to the "path to earned citizenship" for illegal aliens -- another amnesty to its detractors -- in the Senate bill.

The Department of Homeland Security has chosen to focus investigative resources on the most egregious violators, and on those who might pose security threats -- such as contractors on military bases -- rather than attempt to police less serious offenders. The program has been successful, reeling in millions in penalties. But the DHS needs a civil enforcement program that will command all employers' attention, said Baker.

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Fines need to be substantially increased, and multiplied for recidivist offenders, he added.

Employers have been granted a free pass for noncompliance due to the scant resources that are focused on a few key industries, said C. Stewart Verdery Jr., who previously held Baker's job at homeland security.

But it's not so easy for those who wish to comply with rules, said Linda Dodd-Major, former director of the office of business liaison at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Those who try to get assistance don't get it. Those who call up to try to get removals of undocumented aliens don't get responses," she said.

For Cornyn, finding new documentation to rely on is an essential departure from the failures of the 1986 bill.

"We cannot rely on the same kind of documents and expect to get a different result. There must be a governmental-issued document that verifies employment eligibility or this system will not work. Is it too much to ask that you get something that looks like a drivers license that has your picture on it that your employer can verify is your properly issued card?" Cornyn said Monday at a Senate subcommittee hearing on lessons learned from the 1986 law.

Baker said that the current vision included a card created for a specific population that did not necessarily contain biometric information.

"There are great costs to saying to Americans that they're going to have to get in line for a new form of ID," Baker said. "Those are heavy costs not just in government funds but the time and energy and hassle ... of the American people."

Kyl found Baker's idea insufficient.

"You're going to have to persuade me that not only can social security verify the legitimacy of the number but that you can connect it up to the individual who's presenting the card to you when you walk on the job," Kyl said.

In 2005, the Social Security administration estimated that issuing a new identification card to the 240 million cardholders over the age of 14 would cost an estimated $9.5 billion dollars. The cost per card has increased $3 since then, due to additional verification costs.

Employers were charged with verifying work-eligibility documentation after the 1986 bill.

"The problem we have now is that the employee can present an employer one of 27 different documents. An employer has to be a forensic scientist in the validity of 27 different documents? It makes it really hard to sort out who is a bad actor and who is not," said Ben Johnson, director of the liberal Immigrant Policy Center.

Additionally, employers fearing discrimination lawsuits might allow questionable identification to pass.

"Employers were operating under the mantra of 'Thou shalt not discriminate' ... to accept any document that might be genuine," said Cecilia Muñoz, vice president, office of research, advocacy, and legislation at the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic civil rights group.

Cornyn believes that if a comprehensive solution is not reached, America may face more of the same immigration issues in the future.

"I feel very strongly that unless we are serious about making the system work... we will find ourselves here once again with not 12 million people illegally in the United States but maybe 24 million or more," Cornyn said.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

How about requiring employers to make sure names and SS#'s of employees match by using some Federal database. If the names and SS#'s don't match, employer doesn't get to deduct that individual employee's salary costs on the employer's income taxes.

How is it that everybody else can verify social security numbers but employers cannot. That is crap, they do not want to verify that is the issue.

They'd start wanting to verify if they couldn't deduct the salary expense on their income taxes of those individuals who's names and numbers didn't match.