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Saturday, June 24, 2006
States target employers of aliens
By Kavan Peterson, Stateline.org Staff Writer


Frustrated by Congress' inability to adopt major immigration reform, states are opening a new assault on illegal immigrants by passing laws targeting employers who hire undocumented workers.

Colorado became the first state to empower its Department of Labor and Employment to investigate contractors working for the state government for violating federal laws against hiring illegal aliens. Pennsylvania has stiffened penalties for employers who receive government grants or loans and hire illegal aliens, and state lawmakers are debating legislation to target all employers statewide. And Georgia and Massachusetts, along with Colorado, now require all public employers to use a federal work authorization program to verify that no illegal aliens have been hired.

At least 30 states have considered more than 75 bills targeting employers of illegal immigrants this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). The focus on employers comes at a time when states increasingly are frustrated with federal border enforcement and when politicians up for election this fall are under intense public pressure to crack down on illegal aliens. In all, states have considered nearly 500 bills on immigration in 2006, according to NCSL.

Although the U.S. Senate has passed an immigration-reform package that includes provisions to boost sanctions against employers of illegal aliens, the measure has stalled in the House, where Republican have passed legislation focused on border enforcement and strongly oppose provisions in Senate bill that would grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.

Experts on both sides of the immigration debate said the new interest in employer sanctions represents a shift in how states are coping with the estimated 12 million illegal aliens now in the United States. However, they question whether states' efforts will deter businesses from taking advantage of cheap illegal immigrant labor.

That's because the majority of state proposals are focused only on public contractors, lack enforcement mechanisms, or provide businesses easy loopholes to avoid sanctions, said advocates for stricter enforcement. Proposals with the harshest penalties, such as imposing fines or revoking the business licenses of employers caught hiring illegal aliens, have failed because of partisan bickering and heavy lobbying from the business community.

Arizona lawmakers, for example, dropped employer sanctions from immigration control measures they sent to the November ballot this week. Earlier this month Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) vetoed a major immigration package that had included employer sanctions. Lacking votes to override the governor, the Republican-controlled Legislature instead bypassed her veto pen by putting proposalson the ballot asking voters to amend the state Constitution to make English the official state language and to prevent illegal aliens from receiving a variety of state services.

At least a dozen other states (Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin) also have considered legislation that would have imposed harsh penalties on employers of illegal aliens.

"Without federal enforcement against employers, [state] measures are purely cosmetic," said Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls.

Targeting employers is the latest effort by state lawmakers to make it harder for undocumented immigrants to live and work in their states. Georgia and Kansas recently joined Arizona and Virginia in restricting certain social services from illegal immigrants. Maine joined 39 other states in prohibiting illegal immigrants from getting driver's licenses. Colorado appointed a full-time investigator to pursue identification document counterfeiters, and six states (Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi and Virginia) made human trafficking a felony to target abusers who force illegal immigrants into sweatshops or prostitution.

However, most state actions to crack down on illegal immigration are superseded by federal law and do little to stop illegal immigrants from crossing the border, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at New York University School of Law. For instance, federal law already bars undocumented immigrants from working or receiving most public benefits. Federal law also prohibits states from denying education or emergency health care services to illegal aliens.

"What states are doing are mostly symbolic feel-good measures. Most of these things are more politically motivated than real solutions to real problems," Chishti said.

Colorado, for example, is embroiled in a highly charged election-year debate over whether to put controversial immigration proposals on the November ballot. Republicans are fighting to retain control of the governor's seat and regain a majority in the state Legislature this year.

The state Supreme Court this month touched off a political firestorm when it threw out a Republican-backed citizen initiative that would have banned illegal aliens from receiving public services. The court tossed the measure for violating a constitutional provision requiring ballot initiatives address only a single subject. Advocates of the measure called the ruling politically motivated.

Gov. Bill Owens (R) threatened to call the Democratic-controlled Legislature into a special session to consider putting the proposal on the November ballot despite the court ruling. But last week Democratic state lawmakers, who passed seven immigration control measures this session -- more than any other state -- made the unprecedented move of calling their own special session to preempt the governor.
Never before have state lawmakers called themselves back into special session.

"In an off-year election, the party in power almost always loses votes. That's why Republicans in Colorado are trying so hard to get wedge issues -- like gay marriage, like abortion, like immigration -- on the ballot," said Manolo Gonzalez, a political consultant with the Denver law firm Welchert & Britz Inc. Colorado voters already face dueling ballot questions on same-sex relationships; one measure would amend the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage and the other would create domestic partnerships that confer most marriage benefits.

Targeting employers in the hope of stemming the tide of illegal immigration is not new. About a dozen states adopted laws barring employers from hiring illegal aliens before Congress made it federal law in 1986, Chishti said. The assumption was that enforcement would deter illegal immigration and therefore improve wages and working conditions for U.S. workers.

"Twenty years later the employer sanctions obviously haven't worked, and clearly there's a huge policy vacuum that states either by frustration or by design are walking into," Chishti said.

Advocates for stronger immigration controls argue that federal employer sanctions haven't been effective because they've rarely been enforced in the past 20 years. The Washington Post reported this week that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) scaled back work-site enforcement by 95 percent between 1999 and 2003, prosecuting only four employers for hiring illegal aliens in 2003 compared to 182 in 1999.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which succeeded the INS when immigration control fell under the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003, has dramatically stepped up workplace enforcement in recent months with several high-profile raids in Maryland, Kentucky and other states that netted more than a thousand illegal alien workers.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the priority for workplace immigration shifted to sensitive national security sites, such as airports and nuclear plants, said ICE spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs. However, the federal government has continued to target all employers who "knowingly" employ illegal aliens, she added.

"This is something we've been doing on a daily basis since 2003," Fobbs said.

Federal authorities are trying to look tough on enforcement to boost President Bush's chances of getting immigration reform legislation through Congress, said Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies. Bush supports the Senate bill, which includes controversial measures to offer amnesty to some illegal aliens who are already here and would greatly expand the number of foreign guest workers allowed to enter the U.S.

"This kind of high profile enforcement needs to be accompanied by routine day-to-day enforcement to restore a sense of order and end this idea of impunity," Krikorian said.

So many immigrants enter the country illegally or overstay their visas because U.S. immigration laws are too restrictive to meet the needs of America's economy, said Brian McKinsey, senior vice president of People Inc., a Florida-based business that provides legal immigrant labor for the hotel and resort industry.

The United States gives out only 140,000 green cards per year for permanent foreign workers and allows 66,000 temporary guest workers per year. But the U.S. Department of Labor estimates the Unites States will face a labor shortage of 30 million workers by 2020, McKinsey said. And industries that require large numbers of unskilled workers, such as agriculture and hospitality, already are experiencingshortages, he said.

"Realistically we're going to have to get these workers from somewhere, and even if they were magically able to kick all the illegal aliens out the need for these jobs would continue," McKinsey said.

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Contact Kavan Peterson at kpeterson@stateline.org.