Thread: Fighting a flood of phony IDs

Fighting a flood of phony IDs
Employers feeling heat from accepting illegal worker's fraudulent documents.

By STEPHEN FRANKLIN
Chicago Tribune

PHOENIX -- Nowadays job seekers at Jason LeVecke's sprawling empire of several dozen fast-food restaurants must show up at company headquarters to get hired.

With large numbers of undocumented workers in Arizona and a new state law considered the nation's stiffest on employers of undocumented immigrants, LeVecke is not taking chances that store managers might mistakenly accept an illegal worker's fraudulent documents.

"How am I supposed to recognize the difference between a legal and an illegal worker? How? It's impossible," he said.

Amid all he has done to prepare for January, when the law takes effect, he is angry about being drawn into the battle over illegal immigration and the fake documents that grease the way for millions to illegally live and work in the United States.

And the battle promises to sprawl as federal and state officials search for more effective ways to nab the millions of users of fake IDs while businesses, worried about the loss of their workers as well as being penalized for hiring them, fight back.

Frustrated by the collapse of the immigration reform drive earlier this year, Congress is trying to pick up parts of the package, including a call for more reliable documents. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is pushing ahead with its own sweeping measures to drive fake documents out of the job market. One of them is Real ID, a driver's license that the administration hopes will stump document forgers.

The U.S. government's basic tool today for ferreting out illegal immigrant workers is called E-Verify, a longtime but little-used voluntary system for employers. Arizona's new law is based on E-Verify, and the federal government will soon direct millions of employers to rely on it. The system allows employers to electronically check workers' Social Security numbers against the government database.

Though the government is recommending that all employers use E-Verify, it will soon require all of its contractors to do so.

But businessmen such as LeVecke, along with labor and pro-immigrant groups, say the system is flawed and likely to stir widespread upheavals in workplaces.

A new Illinois law signed by the governor last month backs up some of their argument. It bars Illinois employers from relying on the government's E-Verify system until the Social Security Administration can promptly clear up discrepancies. It says the government must resolve 99 percent of the questions about workers' papers within three days.

U.S. officials replied to the Illinois law last week with a federal court lawsuit in Springfield seeking to strike it down. And Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff castigated Illinois for trying to block the government from carrying out immigration laws.

While Arizona's law is an example of a state embracing the federal system, Illinois' law is the opposite. No other state has gone that far to challenge the federal program, say experts with the National Immigration Law Center, a California-based organization.

In Arizona, a funnel for smugglers entering the U.S. across the often deadly Sonoran desert, illegal immigration is as volatile an issue as anywhere, and document fraud has been a problem.

The state's Fraudulent Identification Task Force -- the only one of its kind in the nation -- has turned up some surprising cases of fraud. Besides driver's licenses and Social Security cards, it also has seized fake IDs for pilots and security guards as well as fake press passes.

"And we probably haven't even hit the tip of the iceberg," said Edward Ochoa, an undercover detective for the task force.

A Federal Trade Commission survey found that Arizona had the highest per capita rate of identity theft in 2006. Nearly 40 percent of the fraud was employment-related, more than twice the national average.

Illegal immigrants rely either on documents that are fake or ones that use someone else's identity. Fakes are cheap, about $150 for a driver's license and a Social Security card. But with businesses checking documents more thoroughly, immigrants prefer IDs based on stolen identities, and the forgers have pushed up their prices, according to Arizona law-enforcement officials.

The Bush administration also seems intent on beefing up enforcement actions.

Some of its efforts, as outlined last month, are aimed at reducing the number of documents workers can offer to prove their legal status as well as requiring more employers to use the government's E-Verify system.

One controversial rule would penalize employers who fail to take action when workers' Social Security numbers don't match the names in the government's files. It was supposed to take effect in mid-September.

But a federal judge in San Francisco has temporarily barred the government from carrying out that rule. The AFL-CIO, several California unions and the ACLU brought the action, saying the rule could lead to discrimination against Latinos and the firing of legal workers. A hearing is set for Monday.

Arizona's Republican-led Legislature in June passed the law that threw LeVecke into action. Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, signed it in July.

It would strip business licenses from any firms caught for the second time knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. All of Arizona's nearly 150,000 employers also would have to check out any new workers on E-Verify.

"No matter how much any employer wants to comply, there is no way businesses in this state can ever reach a complete comfort level to detect illegal workers," said Glenn Hamer, head of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

To block the law, the Arizona Chamber, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 10 other Arizona business groups, filed a federal lawsuit in July in Phoenix.

In their challenge to the Arizona law, they point to the Illinois law, which takes effect in January.

"You have Arizona doing one thing and Illinois doing something else, and that can create legal problems for employers in both states," said David Selden, an attorney for the business groups challenging the new Arizona law.

State Rep. Russell Pearce, a former state judge and deputy sheriff who was the driving force behind the law in the Arizona Legislature, is not moved by the business community's complaints.

"They don't care what happens to America," he said. "It is all about profit."

Federal officials concede problems with the employee verification system, ranging from an 8 percent error rate to its failure to catch someone who has bought another person's identification. Without photos on file for all working Americans, the system is largely blind.

But federal officials say they hope to include an estimated 14 million photos gathered from immigration records in the system.

Marcy Forman, head of investigations for the government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said employers should check workers' documents even if they appear to be legitimate.

"If you live in the Midwest where there may not be a large Puerto Rican population but 40 percent of your workforce is giving you Puerto Rican IDs, good business practices would say you should question them," Forman said.

Part of the government's solution is to make driver's licenses more reliable by requiring states to follow stiffer guidelines for issuing and producing them.

The effort, called Real ID, is supposed to kick in by May, though the government is allowing extensions. There will be a hefty price to pay for states that don't comply. Their residents won't be able to use their driver's licenses to visit federal facilities or fly on most airlines.

Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., said there has been a "historic" groundswell of opposition among states to the Real ID effort, and his organization counts 17 states that have passed some form of legislation opposing the law.

"There are real concerns about costs and inconvenience," Rotenberg said.

Without a system like Real ID or nationally mandated documents that provide fingerprints or eye scans, however, document fraud could continue to flourish, said Richard Stana, a U.S. Government Accountability Office expert on the issue.
http://www.thehawkeye.com/Story/Phony_IDs_093007

REAL ID WILL NOT STOP ID THEFT BUT IT WILL INCREASE IT.


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One of the fallacious arguments or details I hear spouted about by businesses groups that say 'E-Verify (Basic Pilot Program formerly, I believe) just doesn't work good enough'. ... is that since to some degree it relies upon user-reported information (a marriage and change of surname for example) that errors *can* occur in the database. However, many of those discrepancies could be reduced or eliminated by timely reporting of information by individuals. If someone doesn't want their corresponding information to be maintained and be accurate, one simply need not do anything. ...and, since there is no enforced requirement to do so, well, anyone that wants to 'fade away' with regard to official document keeping, well, just fail to report, I suppose....

Sorry but I still think common sense would be your best indicator!

These stories should serve as a reminder to everyone to scrutinize your annual social security statement for accuracy. How awful it would be to arrive at retirement age and find that your account has been hopelessly muddled by someone else using your number.

The illegal immigrants are saying their bosses will just start paying them cash, or fire them and then the illegal will just get another fake number and work for another 3 months, and then another, etc. etc. My friend's neighbor is an illegal in the landscaping business and this is what he said.