The Associated Press is reporting tonight that a federal judge in San Francisco has put a temporary hold on the "no match" letters scheduled to be sent out by the Social Security Administration next week.
The ruling came in a lawsuit by the AFL-CIO, and another hearing on the issue is set for October 1, 2007. The U.S. District Judge making the ruling was Maxine Chesney.
I agree with Governor Rick Perry! Now that is a statement you will not see very many times. But in an article in today's Dallas Morning News Perry is quoted as taking a reasonable approach to border enforcement and a guest worker program. Here are excerpts from the article:
Lawmakers in Washington have failed to see the economic benefits of legal immigration and how a temporary worker program can coexist with greater border security, Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday as he concluded a three-day energy trade mission to Mexico.
Mr. Perry spoke passionately about the two pressing issues between the nations: an immigration overhaul and securing the border without building fences between neighbors.
"We know how to deal with border security, and you don't do it by building a fence," Mr. Perry said at a news conference before meeting with President Felipe Calderón.
Border crime can only be reduced with "boots on the ground" and perhaps some limited fencing in urban areas, Mr. Perry said. Last year, he said, half a dozen police surges at key points along the border reduced crime up to 60 percent.
A columnist for the newspaper where I worked my way through college and law school has an interesting article today about the most recent immigration changes -- the "no match" letters.
Rowland Nethaway says this continuing crackdown on illegal workers is going to damage the nation's economy. Here are excerpts from his column:
WACO, Texas -- If authorities continue to crack down on illegal workers, the full Congress will learn the need for comprehensive immigration reform.
The raids and arrests that have occurred so far have already had an economic impact on the nation's agriculture industry.
Other segments of the economy can expect a sharp downturn as employers lose access to a valuable illegal immigrant workforce.
Unless Congress acts quickly to overhaul the nation's dysfunctional immigration system, Americans can expect to experience a significant jump in prices at the grocery store.
The hit on American pocketbooks will not be limited to price hikes and shortages at the supermarket. Across the economy, many services will decline while direct costs will rise.
Evidently, not enough members of Congress play chess. Even beginning chess players know they must think several moves ahead to have any chance at winning.
Congress' enforcement-only camp succeeded in shooting down a comprehensive immigration reform bill supported by President Bush and a bipartisan assemblage of Democrats and Republicans.
The legislation would have provided a method to legally match foreign workers with American employers.
In another example of being careful about what you ask for, immigration authorities have stepped up enforcement of long-ignored laws that make it illegal for U.S. employers to hire illegal immigrant workers.
Additionally, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced a new policy that requires employers to follow up on "no-match" letters from the Social Security Administration.
These letters will inform employers when the nine-digit sequence of numbers provided by their workers does not to match the Social Security database.
For years now, employers have known that nothing would happen to them when they wadded up and tossed these no-match letters into the nearest trash can.
Now, employers have been told that if they do not clear up mismatched Social Security numbers, then the identified workers must be fired or the employers will face fines up to $10,000, as well as possible criminal charges.
It's been unlawful to hire illegal workers for decades. About the only time the immigration law has made news has been when a presidential nominee was discovered to have hired an illegal nanny.
Breaking the immigration law has been enough to disqualify a nominee from a plum government appointment, but not enough to motivate immigration authorities to enforce the law on employers across the nation.
Full enforcement of the new no-match requirement will only disrupt a fraction of illegal workers who can buy, borrow or steal valid Social Security numbers.
Also, the letters will only be sent to employers with at least 10 workers with mismatched Social Security numbers, and where those workers make up at least 0.5 percent of their workforce.
An estimated 75 percent of day laborers are illegal and undocumented. As a rule, no documents are requested and none are given. Many of these workers endure wage theft from unscrupulous employers.
Still, the recent baby steps that have been taken to enforce long-standing immigration laws have caused serious disruptions in the operations of many American businesses as word of the crackdowns has spread.
Early reports indicate that many farmers will produce only 50 percent of their normal crops due to the growing labor shortage.
In some cases, farmers have chosen to not plant due to the difficulty in finding workers to harvest the crops.
It is estimated that at least two-thirds of the workers in construction and agriculture are working illegally.
The enforcement-only critics who killed comprehensive immigration reform should have easily predicted this outcome. But they didn't.
Rowland Nethaway writes for the Waco Tribune-Herald.
As a result of the inability of Congress to enact workable immigration reform, the Bush Administration has announced plans to increase enforcement, placing employers in a difficult position. The Administration's latest plan requires employers to resolve discrepancies between employee records and those of the Social Security Administration or the Department of Homeland Security. Once the employer has notice of a discrepancy in Social Security number or immigration status information from what is referred as a "no match" letter, the employer has 90 days to re-verify the information. If the employer is unable to correct the discrepancy within this time frame, the employer has the following two choices: (1) terminate the employment, or (2) continue the employment. If the employer chooses the first option and terminates the employment, he or she may be faced with lawsuits by employees. If the employer chooses the second option, he or she may be faced with severe civil and criminal sanctions from the Department of Homeland Security.
Employers often receive "no match" letters for several reasons, such as clerical errors or failure to register a change of name after marriage. Both employers and employees can face bureaucratic delays in attempting to document and correct records. With this new enforcement plan employers will be made to jump through hoops, and employees could face potential termination as a result of these delays. These enforcement measures could have serious consequences on industries such as agriculture, hospitality, and construction.
The construction and agriculture labor pool relies in significant part on undocumented or illegal immigrant labor. Nationwide, it is estimated that undocumented illegal workers number more than 12 million, with approximately 2.4 million of those workers employed in construction.
American society continues to be redefined by immigration, but the modern illegal immigrant community faces different challenges than previous immigrant populations.
After the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the U.S. government consolidated Immigration and Naturalization Services (now known as Citizenship and Immigration Services) with the Department of Homeland Security. As a result of the merger between these two agencies, there has been great emphasis on "tightening" America's borders.
There is now a greater focus on regulating the entry and conduct of undocumented illegal immigrants through the primary investigative department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Despite the economic and social reliance on undocumented laborers, Congress continues to introduce bills geared toward immigration enforcement rather than reform, having serious consequences for the industries that employ these immigrants.
Potential employers of illegal immigrant laborers should closely monitor immigration reform and enforcement legislation as both could potentially pose severe punishments for such employers. The punishments may include prison sentences for employers who are repeat offenders, and/or fines of up to $10,000. Should such legislation take effect, it is likely that a national labor shortage may occur. The labor shortages in the affected industries would result in increased costs, strains and delays on local businesses as well as the community overall. Unfortunately, we may have to wait for at least the next two years for comprehensive immigration reform. As of now, with the enforcement-only approach immigrant employees and their employers are faced with a huge road block. Employees are unable to apply for legal status because no paths to legal status are available under the current system. Employers cannot find legal workers because no employment visas exist for such workers.
Enforcement-only legislation is not the answer. Congress needs to resume negotiations of comprehensive reforms that will secure our nations future by creating clear paths to lawful residence, providing new worker programs, eliminating backlogs in family immigration, assuring due process and protection of civil liberties while safeguarding our national security interests.
For more information about immigration news, immigration laws, immigration policies, proposed immigration laws, border enforcement, green cards, citizenship, employment visas, family visas, naturalization, and other immigration subjects, please visit Immigration Law Answers and DFW Immigration Law Blog.
The Bush administration announced plans today to crack down on illegal immigration in several ways. MSNBC.com is one of the many media outlets reporting the basics of the new policies. Here are excerpts from their article:
The latest measures mainly involve tighter enforcement of existing laws - posing a challenge to the many US employers now reliant on migrant workers.
"The message we are conveying today is pretty simple: we are serious about immigration enforcement," said Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary.
Mr Bush made immigration reform a priority of his second term, backing bipartisan legislation that aimed to strengthen border security while offering a path to citizenship for the estimated 12m illegal immigrants already in the US.
But the bill collapsed in June amid fierce opposition from grassroots Republicans, who accused Mr Bush of offering an amnesty to those who entered the US illegally.
The measures announced on Friday reflected the pressure on Mr Bush to get tough on the highly charged issue of illegal immigration.
The White House acknowledged there was little chance of Congress passing immigration legislation in the foreseeable future. "Until Congress chooses to act, we're going to be taking some energetic steps of our own," said Mr Chertoff.
One rule proposed on Friday would mandate employers to sack workers unable to verify their legal status within 90 days. Employers who failed to comply would face possible criminal fines and sanctions. "We're going to continue to clamp down on employers who knowingly and wilfully violate the laws," said Mr Chertoff.
Carlos Gutierrez, the commerce secretary, promised to streamline existing visa rules to help industries, such as agriculture and hospitality, that rely on migrant labour. "We will use every available tool to provide America's farmers, ranchers and small businesses with a legal workforce, to stay in business and keep our economy strong," he said.
Edward Kennedy, the Democratic senator who helped craft the failed immigration bill, said the proposals were no substitute for comprehensive reform.
"Without strong new laws, the administration's plan will do little to enhance our security and will hurt millions of immigrant families who are contributing so much to our communities and our economy," he said.
Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator who opposed the bill, said the measures were not tough enough. "I won't be happy until I see action that's more than just a press conference and words on a piece of paper."
Today's Dallas Morning News has a thought-provoking editorial about the consequences of a new proposal to crack down on employers of illegal aliens. What would happen if 8,000,000 workers lost their jobs suddenly? Here's the editorial:
Critics of comprehensive immigration reform often insist that simply enforcing the laws we already have would go a long way toward solving our growing illegal immigration problem.
We don't entirely disagree. We do believe strongly that a national strategy should include more than a fence along the Mexican border and deporting every person without papers, but who can be against enforcing current law?
So we were pleased to hear that the Department of Homeland Security intends to crack down on employers who hire workers here illegally with tougher rules that require firing anyone using false Social Security numbers to get work. Backing that policy will be more raids of suspect job sites.
The old employer excuse: "Hey, they had papers."
The feds' new rejoinder: "Hey, you should have known better. We sent you a no-match letter."
In short, if the Social Security Administration can't connect a number filed with it to a real identity, employers will be notified by mail. Instead of ignoring these notices, as often happened in the past, or just passing them along to the worker to deal with, employers will have 90 days to resolve discrepancies. If they can't, they must fire the worker or face a $10,000 fine per illegal immigrant.
"There are not going to be any more excuses for employers," said Russ Knocke, a Homeland Security spokesman, "and there will be serious consequences for those that choose to blatantly ignore the law."
Fair enough.
But let's also be clear about the consequences. The feds say they expect to send out 140,000 no-match letters this year, covering more than 8 million workers. We seriously doubt employers will risk $10,000 fines for the vast majority of them.
That means untold numbers of workers out of jobs. Some will go home. Others with spouses or kids in school might roll the dice and try to use those same forged documents to find another job. In the most desperate circumstances, some may even turn to crime to survive.
Imagine for a moment the increased strain this will place on our social service network - food banks, emergency health care and our already overstuffed jails. This is where "too bad for them" falls apart as a response. Everyone who pays taxes will foot the bill.
This is one reason we continue to push Congress to renew the immigration debate. A biometric ID card - close to impossible to forge - was one excellent idea that got washed away in anti-reform tide, as did a realistic guest worker program that would have given hundreds of thousands of needed workers a way to work within the law.
Targeting employers makes sense, as long as we realize who will pay the price.
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