San Francisco Chronicle EDITORIAL

Warning: Pro-Business Shill Says:
A war on state's economy
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 5RJAF9.DTL
Sunday, August 19, 2007

NOT SATISFIED with its full-scale attack on Iraq, the Bush administration is now launching an inexplicable, unwarranted and unworkable attack on California's economy and its social fabric.

It is doing so by declaring war against employers who hire illegal immigrants - and against these immigrants themselves.

No state will be hurt more than California, which is home to at least one-quarter of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. California's $32 billion agricultural industry is dependent on them. They also make up a significant percentage of the construction, restaurant, hotel and other sectors of the California workforce.

Within weeks, the Dept. of Homeland Security, in concert with the Social Security Administration, is planning to send out waves of "no match" letters to employers. If an employee's Social Security information does not match those on file with the federal government, the employer will be required to fire the worker within 90 days, if the discrepancy can't be resolved. If the worker isn't fired, the employer will be subject to a $2,200 fine per worker, and stiffer penalties later on.

For years, President Bush has made the argument that immigration "enforcement" must be accompanied by "comprehensive reform" of the entire system, including some form of legalization of undocumented immigrants.

Now that "comprehensive reform" of immigration laws crashed and burned in Congress this spring, however, Bush has embraced an "enforcement only" strategy.

Ideally, there would be no illegal immigrants in the United States. The way to enter the country, and to stay here, should be with a legal visa.

But our immigration policies have not kept pace with the needs of the U.S. economy. With a 4.6 percent national unemployment rate, it is becoming increasingly clear there are insufficient native-born workers to meet employers' needs in many sectors of the economy.

As even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan argued, the inflow of foreign workers, both legal and illegal, has been a major factor in sustaining the growth and productivity of the U.S. economy.

But the Bush administration has adopted a vindictive approach that ignores the realities of the United States and California economy. The state's 35,000 agricultural employers hire more than 800,000 people to work on farms each year. Half or more are likely to be undocumented.

The administration has cynically said that it plans to reform existing temporary-worker programs such as the H2-A Agricultural Seasonal Worker Program and the H-2B program for non-agricultural workers to make it easier to legally hire foreign workers.

But reform of these programs will not happen any time soon - certainly not within the next 90 days. "They are as much of a hornet's nest from a regulatory point of view as any aspect of immigration law," Demetrious Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, and one of the most astute analysts of the immigration landscape, told us.

The administration's enforcement "surge" is also likely to take a toll on families and communities. Statistics show that many illegal immigrants are part of families made up of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens. Many families will be broken apart by the policies the administration plans to imminently enforce.

Polls by the Public Policy Institute of California show that 60 percent of Californians believe that illegal immigrants should be allowed to apply for legal work permits. Yet, the Bush administration is plunging ahead with its misguided policies without consulting with California's elected officials, or its business leaders.

It's possible that the destructive enforcement policies it has announced are part of complicated chess-like strategy to get employers so riled up that they will force Congress to pass immigration reform by the end of the year. But the chances of that happening are, at best, remote.

"Since the gambit will most likely fail, the administration will find itself between a rock and a hard place," Papademetriou said. "These policies will damage important sectors of the economy. But if the administration backs off on it its promises, that will allow its detractors to say what they have been saying all along - that this administration was not serious about enforcement in the first place."

Another possible motive is that the Bush administration is trying to embarrass the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill for Congress' failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform - even though it's mostly Republicans who oppose those reforms.

Our nation's immigration policies cannot be allowed to be used as a tool to advance anyone's political interests. Reform must focus on strong border enforcement and an orderly immigration process and it must begin now.