Thread: Overhaul must break the culture that encourages illegal work

http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/news/133033

Overhaul must break the culture that encourages illegal work force
The first in a four-part series on illegal labor reform
By Brady McCombs and Thomas Stauffer
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.11.2006
All day long, Border Patrol agents head south from their station on West Ajo Way toward the nation's busiest corridor for illegal crossings.

They pass one sprouting subdivision after another, where construction workers oblivious to passing la migra trucks lay foundation, staple insulation and pound roof shingles. Many of them — at least one third in Arizona — are here illegally.

Workers here illegally have learned like millions before them — make it past the increasingly militarized U.S. border and you'll find safe haven and steady work in industries such as home building, which employs more than 27,000 people in Tucson.

Within weeks, the U.S. House and Senate will begin wrangling over their widely varied proposals to revamp immigration laws, spurred in large part by growing public discontent over the unending flow of illegal immigrants into this country.

But the plans fall short of the multipronged approach needed for real reform, according to an Arizona Daily Star analysis based on interviews with dozens of academics, analysts and employers. Tangible change demands a fraud-proof system to verify legal workers and a wholesale overhaul that would bust more employers of illegal workers and force the sharing of critical information among federal agencies.

That would take years and cost billions — and demand the destruction of a culture that for decades has tolerated illegal immigration in exchange for its many silent benefits.

In Tucson, illegal workers such as Jorge Quintanilla benefit from steady paychecks and from educational and cultural opportunities scarce or unavailable in their native countries.

Home builders and subcontractors such as excavator George Simon, who knowingly or unknowingly hire illegal workers, benefit from labor that keeps Tucson's $2 billion-a-year home-building industry growing.

And homeowners such as Robert and Alva Armenta benefit from new-house prices that might have been beyond their reach without illegal labor, which economists say holds down wages and home prices.

Eliminating the illegal work force would mean higher pay for legal
workers, at least in the short term, economists say. But some builders fear it also would push up home prices — now 30 percent higher than in April 2005 — and drive down profit margins already so thin some say they're tempted to put away their hammers for good.

Massive reform also could upset big-business campaign contributors who favor lax work-site enforcement, says Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

"The easiest thing to do is throw money at the border. Nobody objects to that," Papademetriou says. "When you start shutting businesses down, people get pissed off."

No matter the cost, society no longer can ignore the "illegal" in illegal immigration, says Rick Oltman, Western field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

"First of all, it's against the law, and the second thing is that it has the impact of inflating our population, driving down wages, putting burdens on social services, schools, education, law enforcement," says Oltman, whose group favors less legal immigration and a stop to illegal immigration. "And it sends the entirely wrong message around the world as to what our immigration policies are."

Tough talk

With estimates of illegal residents in this country reaching as high as 12 million, immigration reform has become a popular refrain.

In the Arizona Legislature, a bill sought to have illegal immigrants arrested as trespassers and let employers go unpunished if they fired workers upon learning they were illegal. Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano vetoed the measure on Tuesday.

Nationally, the Senate and House proposals focus primarily on border security, but they also include provisions to quash the illegal work force:

● Higher penalties and fines.
● A mandatory electronic system to verify work eligibility.
● Fraud-proof identification cards.
● Sharing of information between the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

The Senate bill, which includes a guest-worker program with a path to permanent legal status, would provide more agents to investigate employers. The House bill would not. It deals mostly with border enforcement and makes illegal entry a felony.

President Bush favors a temporary guest-worker program and tamper-proof Social Security cards. He also wants harsher penalties for those who hire illegal immigrants, comparing current fines to parking tickets.
Such changes would worry illegal workers such as Quintanilla, but so far he's willing to live with the risks.

"Why did I come to the United States — to hide?" he asked. "No, I came to the United States to give my family a better life and give my best for a country I'm helping build."

Implementing an immigration plan would take years, even if Congress could reach a compromise, says Daniel Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based libertarian public-policy research foundation.

"There are just a lot of challenges between where we are at now and legislation that could pass Congress and be signed by the president," says
Griswold, who has studied immigration for nine years.

Getting there means overpowering a business lobby that has fought hard to preserve the status quo, Oltman says.

"That has been the game all these years — to ask those in power not to enforce the law, drag their feet and make excuses," Oltman says.

Staying there means withstanding shifting political winds, Papademetriou says.

"This is serious money we are talking about, and this is a country that is having serious budget problems," he says. "My guess is that as soon as the country moves on from the issue of immigration, among the first things that will fall by the wayside will be funding for a robust effort at employer sanctions."

Big show

As lawmakers debated reform in recent weeks, Homeland Security unveiled its plan to crack down on employers. Like a Hollywood producer premiering a film, the department put on a big show meant to leave an impression.

Officials stood tall and talked tough on April 20 in Washington, D.C., one day after agents arrested more than 1,100 illegal workers and seven current and former executives of pallet maker Ifco Systems at 45 sites nationwide, including Phoenix.

"Our nation's communities cannot be a wild frontier where illegal aliens and unscrupulous employees subvert our nation's laws," Julie Myers, assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that day.

The plan — Phase 2 of the Secure Border Initiative, which first concentrated on border control — promises to levy criminal charges, not just fines, to punish employers who repeatedly hire illegal immigrants. It also aims to eliminate workers' use of fake Social Security numbers by giving Homeland Security access to Social Security data.

Already under way is the shift toward criminal indictments and away from fines, which range from $275 to $11,000 per violation and which many employers see as a cost of doing business, says Russell Ahr, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman.

Since Oct. 1, agents have arrested more than 2,000 people, including four managers and 76 workers at a Kentucky construction company, as well as the owner of an Indiana stucco firm. The agency is going after big employers rather than mom-and-pop operations, Ahr says.

New work-site enforcement units have been set up in Tucson and Phoenix this year. And for the first time since the Immigration and Naturalization Service merged into Homeland Security in 2003, work-site agents can focus on employers outside the realm of likely terrorists targets such as airports and nuclear plants, Ahr says.

Construction companies' new status as immigration bad guys doesn't sit well with home builders such as Les Wolf, who says he won't hire illegal workers but has trouble finding enough legal ones. Tucson needs 5,000 more construction workers to keep up with growth, the Southern Arizona Home Builders Association says.

"The available work force, as we sit here right now, is home watching ESPN and MTV, and playing their Game Boys and their Xboxes, and sitting there becoming obese Americans with their poor work ethic and terrible sense of values with no loyalty or commitment base," Wolf says. "That's a problem, and now we're going to get upset because someone that doesn't have any of those problems crosses a border and wants a job."
Politically, the arrests and the shift to criminal indictments put employers on notice of a new era.

But it all provides little bang for the buck, the Cato Institute's Griswold says. Even with the agents Homeland Security wants to add, the department still won't have enough to police the nation's businesses. And each bust takes time; the Ifco pallet firm arrests came after a yearlong investigation.

The biggest crackdown so far nabbed 350 illegal-immigrant janitors and resulted in an $11 million settlement with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., whose sales in the last fiscal year were a record $312 billion.

"We busted 300 janitors — 300 down, 7 million workers to go," Griswold says.

Real change across the nation and across industries would take billions more dollars, hundreds more agents and several years, says Papademetriou, of the Migration Policy Institute. Homeland Security is requesting an additional $41.7 million and 206 new agents and support staff members next year.

Toothless laws

The vague wording and loopholes in immigration laws, coupled with empty threats by those trying to enforce them, deliver a clear message to employers: Clean up or else, wink, wink.

"The system was created with the intent of protecting employers," Papademetriou says.

The current climate emerged along with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which made it illegal to hire unauthorized workers. The government gave amnesty to an estimated 3 million illegal immigrants in the country before 1982 but never enforced the law against employers.

The law's wording was key: Immigration authorities must prove an employer "knowingly" hired illegal workers. That lets employers accept reasonably legitimate-looking documents to comply with the law, Papademetriou says.

That — along with widespread use of fraudulent Social Security cards and green cards, and the absence of a reliable verification system — gives employers an excuse for being unable to determine who's legal and who's not, he says.

Both immigration proposals would devote more resources to stemming fraud.

The House bill doesn't change the law's wording. The Senate bill tweaks it to include "reckless disregard," a modification that would make the law a little harsher on employers, Tucson immigration attorney Patricia Mejia says.

Slow death

For two decades after the 1986 reform act, U.S. immigration agencies fattened up on generous allocations from lawmakers intent on plugging the nation's leaky borders.

By 2002, the nation's immigration-enforcement budget had ballooned to $4.9 billion, compared with $1 billion provided by the 1985 budget. But work-site enforcement was eroding, hamstrung by a dwindling number of agents and by laws that shielded employers.

The United States spent 58 percent of its immigration budget on border control in 2002, the most recent year for which analysis is possible because of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's merger with Homeland Security. It spent 33 percent on detention, removal and intelligence, and 9 percent on interior investigation — a tiny fraction of that for employer investigations, a 2005 study by the Migration Policy Institute found.

The United States now has about 11,350 Border Patrol agents, compared with about 325 customs enforcement agents assigned to investigate employers.

"The official policy of the U.S. government is to put this huge wall of enforcement at the border, but if you get through that, we won't bother you," says Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey, who has studied Mexican migration for nearly three decades.

Under the current law, investigators must give employers three days' notice that they plan to show up and review personnel records. An information sheet posted on May 8 on the National Association of Home Builders' Web site reminds its clients that "in the past, it has been possible to negotiate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for longer periods," up to 10 to 12 business days.

A new Homeland Security program lets employers store employment forms electronically. But the advance-notice provision stands.

Accomplices

Business owners say they can't tell real documents from fake ones — but they're not lining up for help in figuring it out.

Both Citizenship and Immigration Services — a federal Homeland Security bureau — and Social Security have programs to help employers check work status. Fewer than one half of one percent of American businesses take advantage of the programs, the Government Accountability Office found.

About 6,000 employers use a Social Security program that lets them send a diskette with workers' names and Social Security numbers for verification within 30 days. The agency also has a toll-free number for employers to check up to five names and numbers at once. In 2003, it got about 1.1 million calls, but the agency doesn't track how many employers that represents.

As of January, about 5,800 businesses had signed up for Citizenship and Immigration Services' Basic Pilot Program, a Web-based service that lets employers verify workers' eligibility. About 2,300 actively use it. That includes 26 in Tucson covering 229 work sites, says Marie Sebrechts, a Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman. Three of the sites belong to construction companies.

The House bill proposes a mandatory telephone version of the Basic Pilot Program, which would cost the government, employers and workers about $11.7 billion per year, with employers paying the most, according to a GAO estimate. The Senate bill doesn't specify an employee-verification program.

Neither bill addresses problems with the systems in use now. The Basic Pilot Program, offered since 2004, has been plagued by delays in updating immigration records, errors determining work status and difficult-to-use software, and it cannot detect identity fraud, the GAO says. And even if more employers wanted to use it, Citizenship and Immigration Services has says it couldn't handle the load.
Fraud-proof documents

Creating fraud-proof documents and devising a verification system are critical first before targeting businesses, the Migration Policy Institute's Papademetriou says.

"You can't go after employers until you give them all the tools to play by the rules," he says. "And getting to that point from where we are will take time, and it will take money."

Federal lawmakers aim to do that by making Social Security cards fraud-proof. The GAO analyzed three options:

● Make the card machine-readable, which would take the burden of determining a card's validity off employers. However, the card would remain vulnerable to counterfeiting.

● Add biometric features, such as fingerprints or digital pictures, which would let employers verify identity but would require workers to update their cards periodically. Both the Senate and House bills, as well as Bush, support this kind of change.

● Eliminate the card and require more secure documents to prove work eligibility.
T
he mass issuance of new cards would cost billions and take years, says Barbara Bov-bjerg, the GAO's director of education, work force and income security issues. The immigration bills do not yet provide for the costs of specific programs.
O
ne solution may be cards created to comply with the Real ID Act, which calls for uniform state driver's licenses, Bovbjerg says. They could become the fraud-proof national identification cards some people are clamoring for — if such a program is implemented. Two years after passage, Homeland Security is still setting state guidelines for the program, she says.

Sharing information

Both the House and Senate bills would force Social Security and Homeland Security to share information.

So far, a lack of coordination between them has prevented enforcement against violators, the GAO says.

The Earning Suspense File, created for cases in which Social Security numbers don't match the name of the person using them, was credited with about $60 billion in reported earnings in 2004 — a number that increased 144 percent from the 1980s to the 1990s and is on pace to increase by about 200 percent this decade.

The file includes data on illegal workers as well as employer errors, name changes and variances in legal status. Construction is one of the top two industries — along with eating and drinking establishments — that contribute to the file.

Immigration-law overhaul could give Homeland Security access to the file. But if the two agencies' past dealings are an indication, working together could pose a challenge.

In December 2004, Congress instructed Social Security and Homeland Security to form a task force to fight Social Security fraud. Social Security didn't contact Homeland Security until November 2005, and the task force didn't meet until last January — six months before it was to present its findings to Congress, the GAO says.

The Internal Revenue Service also doesn't share information with Homeland Security and doesn't exercise its enforcement power. The IRS issues thousands of individual taxpayer identification numbers each year to foreigners — investors, for example — who don't have Social Security numbers but who must pay taxes. "Hundreds of thousands" of the 7 million tax numbers belong to illegal immigrants, the GAO says.

An estimated 353,000 illegal workers filed returns with such tax numbers in 2000, says the Office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. That information is not passed between agencies due to restrictions on sharing tax information and limited Homeland Security resources, the GAO says.

The IRS is studying ways to share information with Homeland Security. But immigration-change proposals don't mention stopping the fraudulent use of taxpayer ID numbers.

Shifting commitments

Changing a culture that tolerates — and benefits from — illegal labor means backing the commitment with money and manpower, says Oltman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

"We need the political will to do it," Oltman says.

For now, the border remains Bush's top priority. In his nationally televised immigration-reform address on May 15, Bush pledged to send 6,000 National Guard troops to the border immediately and to hire 6,000 new Border Patrol agents by 2008.

He talked about border security for nearly six minutes of his 17-minute speech.

The president pledged to create a fraud-proof ID card to make employers more accountable, but he didn't mention additional staffing to make it possible.

He spent one minute on the topic.

Important post, Brian.

The president pledged to create a fraud-proof ID card to make employers more accountable, but he didn't mention additional staffing to make it possible.

This is such a complex issue.

Does anyone else see the fingerprint of the beginning of national ID requirements, for citizens and LEGAL immigrants, also