1/9/2008
Law would bar immigration law violators from tax breaks
By NATE JENKINS
Associated Press Writer

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) -- A state lawmaker wants to wave a big stick at companies who may be hiring illegal immigrants, threatening to take away their state-approved tax breaks if they knowingly employ them.

The strategy, from Sen. Gwen Howard of Omaha, represents a new attack on illegal immigration that is sharply different from the one supported by Gov. Dave Heineman. The dueling approaches could heat up the already hot topic of illegal immigration among lawmakers and others across the state this year.

"This has to be a two-way street," said Howard. "Businesses have the ability to help with the immigration issue.

"We have a problem with companies potentially hiring people who aren't U.S. citizens."

Under the bill (LB784) she introduced Wednesday, the opening day of the legislative session, employers who violated federal law by knowingly hiring illegal immigrants wouldn't be able to benefit from a multimillion dollar state tax break package designed to lure in jobs.

Companies would also have to pay back tax breaks they received after they violated the law.

Heineman, meanwhile, is targeting illegal immigrants in a proposal that would require state agencies to verify any resident applying for state benefits is in the United States legally. He says the proposal would help assure that benefits available to U.S. citizens are preserved for those who truly qualify for assistance.

Already, illegal immigrants are forbidden, under a 1996 federal law, from receiving most state benefits. But Attorney General Jon Bruning has said some state agencies are better than others at verifying the status of benefit applicants.

How many, if any, Nebraska businesses that receive tax breaks and have been charged with knowingly hiring illegal immigrants is unclear. Howard said she didn't know of any. Neither did Barry Kennedy, president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce.

But nationally, the number of people arrested on charges related to unlawfully employing illegal immigrants has increased, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2002, just 25 people were arrested on such charges; last fiscal year, 863 people were arrested.

Officials with the agency attribute the increase to more aggressive enforcement.

While not targeting a specific industry with her bill, Howard said "meatpacking comes to mind" as one.

As of July, at least four meatpacking companies with operations in Nebraska had applied for tax breaks, according to records from the state. If they meet their goals of investing a total of more than $40 million to expand of their operations, and hiring additional workers, they could be in line for more than $5 million worth of state tax breaks.

Among those companies is Swift a plant in Grand Island that was one of six sites where ICE officers conducted a coordinated raid in 2006, resulting in about 1,300 arrests of workers.

No charges were filed against Swift.

The law proposed by Howard wouldn't cause the company to change its hiring practices, said a company official, because Swift already does all it can under federal law to ensure its employees are authorized to work there.

"Today, we are doing all we possibly can to make sure people working for us are authorized to work," said Doug Schult, head of employee and labor relations at Colorado-based Swift. States like Nebraska are grasping for answers because the federal government has failed to act while at the same time using a flawed system that doesn't allow companies to cross reference Social Security data with information provided by employees, he said.

"Until employers and the state have a system provided by the federal government to cross reference this data, we will continue to struggle to identify those people truly authorized," to work, he said.
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