Time to make employers pay for illegal immigration
By State Sen. Doug Jackson • September 23, 2010

A few years ago, state lawmakers created a complaint process against employers potentially using illegal immigrants. The legislation was designed to get serious about illegal immigration, but a last-minute change restricted the bill to complaints from elected officials. Consequently, there have been few complaints and no results.

But recently I discovered the reasons of such inaction are a combination of government bureaucracy and an abject apathy that benefits big businesses instead of taxpayers. In response to a complaint from a constituent, I asked the Department of Transportation about a road contractor. Under an executive order issued in 2006, any state contractor is to hire only workers who have a legal right to work in Tennessee.

The answer: TDOT simply does not enforce the order. I was sent to the Department of Finance and Administration, which is supposedly in charge of enforcing the law. But instead of verifying that an employer has the required federal I-9 form to ensure an employee’s work status, the department simply checks to see if the employer filled out its paperwork correctly. There are no site checks, and no requests for I-9 forms.

I then called the Department of Labor to see if a contractor had ever been penalized or lost a state contract for hiring illegal workers. They never have. Our enforcement of federal and state labor laws, then, comes down to a cursory review of a file in a Nashville office to make sure somebody signed their name on the right lines – and no one has ever been penalized.

I find it offensive that the state of Tennessee would deceive its citizens and taxpayers by blatantly ignoring an already weak law. In my district, Lewis County has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state. How can residents there expect to find work fairly when employers can easily hire cheap, illegal labor with no consequences? I know good contractors who have been left with unsuccessful bids and have had to lay off American citizens because they lost to contractors thought to be using illegal labor. In effect, we have used taxpayer dollars to increase unemployment and reward businesses that may be cheating the system.

I will not stand for such willful disregard of the struggling people in my district. I plan to present legislation next year that will require on-site reviews of immigration documents and will strip state contracts from employers if they don’t have the proper paperwork for their workers. We may not be able to control how Washington spends our money, but we can surely control how Tennessee spends ours. Big businesses and out-of-state contractors have tossed aside our laws and encouraged increased illegal immigration for too long. It’s time to show them the consequences.


– Sen. Doug Jackson represents Dickson, Giles, Hickman, Humphreys, Lawrence, and Lewis counties.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20100 ... mmigration