Thread: Hiring Rule Has Employers Worried

http://www.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBF7J4V8QE.html

Hiring Rule Has Employers Worried

By LINDSAY PETERSON The Tampa Tribune

Published: Jul 30, 2006


TAMPA - The letters come every year telling managers at Tampa Wholesale Nursery that some of their workers' Social Security numbers don't match government records.

Owner Roy Davis tells the workers to bring in correct information or he'll have to fire them. Sometimes they return with new numbers. "Sometimes they're not Guadelupe anymore. They're Jose," he said.

This ID card shuffle has been going on for years, said Davis, who started his Dover plant nursery in 1961. He doesn't see it stopping with the latest enforcement proposal from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

For nearly 70 years, the Social Security Administration has sent letters to businesses when employees' names and numbers on wage reports didn't match the agency's records. The purpose, emphasized in the letters, has been to ensure workers get credit for all their earnings.

Now, Homeland Security wants to use those letters to prosecute people who employ illegal immigrants. If the plan goes through, a no-match letter will be treated as proof that a worker might be illegal. An employer who can't get that worker to clear up the discrepancy in two weeks has 60 days to fire him, or face criminal penalties.

Until recently, most employers using illegal workers faced minimal fines. This new proposal threatens employers with jail time. It's part of an attempt to cut the number of illegal immigrants by more aggressively going after the people who give them jobs.

The rule doesn't need the approval of Congress because it simply clarifies existing law, officials say. They expect it to become final by the end of the year. They're taking public comments on the proposal until mid-August.

Restaurant, construction and agriculture trade groups are urging the department to scrap the plan or postpone action until Congress passes an immigration reform bill.

The proposal alarms Florida farmers. "It would decimate our industry," said Mike Sparks, chief executive officer of the trade group Florida Citrus Mutual in Lakeland.

Half to three-fourths of farmworkers are thought to be illegal, agriculture officials say, though many come to work with Social Security cards and other work permits that appear to be genuine.

Employers aren't supposed to hire illegal immigrants, but neither are they allowed to ask them whether they are legal if their identification looks legal. The result is an unofficial "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

"The system we have now isn't perfect," he said, "but if they're going to throw it out, they need to come up with something else that works, and this is not going to work," Sparks said.

The Unspoken Truth
"We're checking their papers and paying their taxes," said Tommy Brock, a Plant City strawberry farmer. "Now they want to pack them up and send them back, but nobody wants to see the reality. I'm disappointed our legislators can't get up there and tell the truth."

The truth, he said, is that his strawberry workers earn well over minimum wage. Some earn $12 to $15 an hour during the heavy picking season.

Also, if his Mexican and Central American workers were forced out, his berries would go unpicked for lack of labor - or he would have to pay so much that cheaper foreign imports would drive him out of business.

"People have become so used to cheap food, it's unbelievable," he said.

Davis is angry, but mainly because the government is threatening employers with criminal convictions while failing to adopt a serious immigration policy.

"It's putting the responsibility on farmers and it won't take any responsibility itself," he said.

He called immigration agents one day when he had a worker whose identification was clearly fraudulent. He was told he couldn't detain the worker. Agents couldn't come to pick up the man because they didn't have anyone available, he said.

"So I let him go, and I'm sure he just went down the road to work for the farmer next door."

That's what Davis imagines will happen with workers who are fired when they can't explain discrepancies in the Social Security records. "They'll just go to work for the next guy, and the next guy after that."

Employees can work for a company for as long as a year before being named in a letter.

Law Proved Flawed
"You don't need to try to attack the employer," Davis said. "It's not the employer's fault. It's the government's fault because they do not have a set of rules that we can follow, and the bottom line is we have got to have folks who will work."

Though Congress made it illegal to use undocumented workers in 1986, in the same bill that granted amnesty to millions of immigrants, hiring continues unabated.

It's hard to prove an employer has knowingly hired illegal workers. Even when violations are blatant, fines can be as low as $275, said Steward Baker, Homeland Security assistant secretary.

What the law did do was spark a brisk trade in false Social Security cards and residency documents, Baker told a Senate subcommittee last month.

In 1996, Congress approved a program enabling employers to immediately verify whether new workers' names and Social Security numbers matched. It is still only voluntary, though, with about 10,000 employers participating last year. Homeland Security officials say the program has accuracy problems.

Critics of Homeland Security's latest proposal say thousands of people could be wrongly fired because of mistakes in the Social Security database.

"Workers could face termination by panicked employers before they can prove they are on the list mistakenly. This would lead to thousands of unlawful mass firings," said one letter to Homeland Security.

Exploiting Workers
Also, many employers have used no-match letters to exploit workers, according to a study by the Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois at Chicago.

In 2003, researchers surveyed 921 people named in no-match letters in 18 states, including Florida - whose employers received 6,123 letters that year.

In several cases, employers told workers that if they could get new false numbers they could return to work - for lower wages.

In an Indiana case, workers said a supervisor provided fraudulent identification to workers who appeared on no-match lists. In return, the supervisor kept the workers' first 10 paychecks.

The no-match letter program shows the "contradictory and destructive impacts of current U.S. immigration policy," the report said.

The answer, it said, is an immigration policy that enables illegal workers to become legal.

Davis agrees, but he also wants to see an ID card that can't be faked. The government has created a card using digital fingerprints, for instance, to make it tamper-proof, officials said.

Some foreign guest workers have them. Making them for all 250 million workers in the United States isn't so easy, however, Social Security Administrator Jo Anne Barnhart told the House Committee on Ways and Means last week.

Getting it done in two years, she said, would cost $9.5 billion and take 34,000 new employees.

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834 or lpeterson@tampatrib.com

LETTER TRIGGERS
About 9 million of 250 million tax-paying workers had name and number discrepancies on their wage reports last year. The cause could be anything from a clerical error to the use of a false Social Security number.

The government notifies employers only when the mismatches amount to 10 or more and 0.5 percent of a company's workers. That means a company of 5,000 employees would have at least 25 mismatches before being notified.

Social Security sent employers about 120,000 no-match letters last year - one letter can list several employees - and expects to send about the same number this year.

In 2003, the government received $7 billion in taxes from people with mismatched names and numbers. The money remains in the Social Security Trust Fund until the discrepancies are cleared up, if ever.

To read and comment on the government's proposal to use no-match letters to find illegal workers, go to www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?theme=13&content=5436 . It's called "Safe-Harbor Procedures for Employers Who Receive a No-Match Letter."

I have bookmarked this page and encourage everyone to send comments. We have until August 14, 2006.

The government notifies employers only when the mismatches amount to 10 or more and 0.5 percent of a company's workers. That means a company of 5,000 employees would have at least 25 mismatches before being notified.

That is pure B.S. One mismatch should be considered one to many and trigger a letter from the Social Security Administration.

Look at what the illegals are costing us in postage alone sending those letters.

120,000 no-match letters last year @ .34 cents. That's about 41 thousand dollars in postage. Not to mention the salary of the clerks or the cost of paper and envelopes....

http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2...06/E6-9303.htm
ADDRESSES: You may submit comments, identified by DHS Docket No. ICEB-2006-0004, by one of the following methods:

Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov.

Follow the instructions for submitting comments.

E-mail: You may submit comments directly to ICE by email
at rfs.regs@dhs.gov.
Include docket number in the subject line of the message.

Go write a letter!

Dixie