Thread: Immigration crackdown update

Immigration crackdown update
Small businesses are finally getting a say in the "no match" rules.


(Washington, D.C.) -- The onerous "no match" rules that forced employers to face heavy fines for not verifying workers' immigration status within 90 days if social security numbers didn't match were questioned by a San Francisco judge and suspended October 10th. (Full story.) Now, small business owners will get a chance to weigh in about the Bush Administration's rules for cracking down on illegal immigrants.

An odd coalition of lobbying groups from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Chamber of Commerce brought the issue to court by challenging the crackdown, saying that the suspended rules placed too high a burden on businesses. On Friday Federal Judge Charles Breyer agreed, and decided to give the Department of Homeland Security until March 24th 2008 to survey small business owners and get their take how the rules will affect them.

In his four page ruling Justice Breyer found the Social Security database had so many errors that thousands of American citizens and legal immigrants would have been fired. Small businesses are more likely to fire workers because they often lack the resources to go through the complicated verification process.

Since August the Social Security Administration had already sent companies 141,000 no match letters covering 8 million workers giving businesses instructions on how to handle the issue. In his October ruling Breyer also halted those letters saying that the government did not follow proper procedures in implementing the rules.

The groups who filed the suit won't be happy until the department drops the rules all together. "The DHS is continuing down this disastrous path of punishing citizens and legal workers by using the fatally-flawed database," said Lucas Guttentag, Director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project in a statement. "The DHS should finally abandon this illegal approach instead of repeating the same mistake."

But if the DHS has its way those groups are out of luck. The Bush Administration has been adamant about immigration reform and has no plans to let the issue drop anytime soon. The DHS says it will rewrite the rules by the March deadline to get around the judge's objections. The court "got it wrong," says DHS spokesperson Laura Keehner. "However, in the meantime, DHS is planning to provide an answer to the small number of minor issues that the judge raised in his opinion," says Keehner. "This should allow the government to move forward with the rule."
http://oneoldvet.com/?p=3814#more-3814
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/26/smbusin ... 2007112710

It can't be that complicated, folks.

Just make part of the database available to the companies. They call in a worker, run the number. If that number belongs to Annie Smith, born 1942, and you have before you a 25 year old hispanic male, there's a problem, and it's not because Annie has remarried and didn't change her information, either.

It really is that simple

In his four page ruling Justice Breyer found the Social Security database had so many errors that thousands of American citizens and legal immigrants would have been fired.

Tell it to the IRS, whiner.

We need to respond to this....