Our Country gets more Communist by the day! It sickens me that churchs are selling out their flock to make a buck! We have LAWS and our politicians have NO balls!



http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/329 ... tch31.html

Agency told to buck new immigrant crackdown



Dear Social Security: Don't send 'no-match letters'
By DAN RICHMAN AND JOHN IWASAKI
P-I REPORTERS

More than a dozen representatives of labor, church and immigrant-rights groups gathered Thursday outside the Social Security Administration office in Seattle, trying to dissuade its administrator from taking steps they said will lead to mass firings nationwide.


The petitioners handed a request to SSA spokeswoman Joy Chang asking administrator Don Schoening to refrain from mailing so-called no-match letters next week. Chang agreed to consider a meeting addressing the group's concerns.

Later in the day, she said staffers plan to discuss the request with the agency's central office and won't reach a decision about whether to meet until Friday at the earliest.

The SSA is slated Tuesday to begin sending about 140,000 no-match letters to employers nationwide. Of those, about 5,000 will go to employers in Washington state.

The SSA since 1994 has sent such letters once a year to employers when an employee's name and Social Security number on a W-2 form don't match data in the SSA's database, Chang said. But this time, the mailing would have a different effect, the group said.

The half-hour rally, held in the plaza of Columbia Center in Seattle, protested a rule announced earlier this month by the Department of Homeland Security requiring employers under some circumstances to fire employees with non-matching Social Security numbers or face legal sanctions.

DHS' stated objective is to weed out undocumented immigrants. Employers will have 90 days to resolve discrepancies in their records, DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said in a phone interview.

"Those who want to blatantly exploit the law and ignore the no-match letters -- they're going to regret it," he said. "They'll face consequences. It could be financial penalties, criminal charges, jail time."

Until now, employers haven't been required to take action when notified of mismatches, which the group said are caused far more often by clerical errors, misspellings and unusual naming practices than by a worker's lack of a green card. About 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies in SSA's database -- more than 70 percent -- involved native-born U.S. citizens, according to a report in December from the Social Security Administration's Office of the Inspector General.

"Many employers inside and outside the health care industry will fire hundreds or even thousands of employees when they get no-match letters, because they just won't know how to respond to the DHS' new rule," predicted Candace Inagi of Service Employees International Union 775 Northwest.

Will Pittz, executive director of the Washington Community Action Network, said at the rally that "Commissioner Schoening can stop the mess that is about to be created by not sending out no-match letters."

Similar requests are being made this week to the Social Security administrators in the nation's other nine regions, said Carrie Tracy, a spokeswoman for the Northwest Federation of Community Organizations.

The new rule doesn't take effect until Sept. 14, and it is the subject of litigation that could prevent it going into effect at all. A lawsuit to halt the rule was filed Wednesday in a California federal court by the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Law Center. The suit alleges DHS exceeded its authority in making the rule.

DHS said the lawsuit is "an obvious attempt to impede the department's ability to enforce our immigration laws. It is completely without merit and we intend to fight it vigorously."

Businessman Craig Munson, owner of Seattle Floor Service, said at the rally that the rule will induce employers to pay undocumented workers off the books, allowing them to escape paying workers' compensation, unemployment and Social Security taxes. Those cost savings will give his competitors an advantage, he said.

"I just want a level playing field," he said.

DHS spokesman Knocke said the government is facing "a degree of public skepticism" about its commitment to enforcing laws governing illegal immigration. The tougher stance on the no-match letters reflects an effort to restore credibility, he said.

Employers will have another tool to deal with fraudulent identity among immigrants this fall when E-Verify, an Internet-based system operated by DHS, will go online with photo-screening capabilities. The system will let employers compare a prospective employee's appearance with a photo in immigration records, Knocke said. About 14 million images are stored in the system.

The planned crackdown comes after immigration reform legislation in Congress fell apart this summer. Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced the administrative sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants.