Enforce the Laws

The LA Times must have read my blog about employer enforcement of illegal immigrant workers, because they ran the numbers.

A New Jersey labor broker and a security guard firm in California are among thousands of businesses that have filed Social Security tax payments for a large number of workers that do not match any known taxpayer. That, the Social Security agency says, is a sign that the workers are most likely illegal. In 2001, payments for 96% of the New Jersey company's workers did not correspond to any taxpayer on file.

Yet the authorities who enforce immigration law have no access to the names of the companies or the workers.

That is just one of many ways that legal barriers, funding priorities and other problems make it hard for immigration officials to go to the one place they know undocumented workers will be: the work site.

I mean, it's completely ridiculous. The article goes on to note that in the entire country in 2004, THREE companies were fined for hiring undocumented workers. THREE. There are 90 federal workers charged with finding employer violators. For the whole country. Less than 1% of all immigration enforcement money goes to the one place we know the undocumented wind up: the workplace. Yet the tools are in place for employers to comply:

One tool employers... could use is Basic Pilot, run by a branch of the Homeland Security Department. It is a voluntary worker-verification program established in 1996 that many in Congress would like to make mandatory for all companies.

Under Basic Pilot, employers enter employee information into a website within three days of making a new hire. The system then matches the information with data at the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, using Social Security numbers to confirm or deny the employee's eligibility to work. Employees who do not get confirmation must be fired.

About 5,500 of the country's 8 million employers were registered to use Basic Pilot in March.

The House and Senate have compulsory database checks for all workers in their competing bills. The Senate bill increases funding for on-site checks. And both bills encourage employers to use Basic Pilot. But of course the problem is enforcement.

I don't want to break up families that come here because their home countries are so oppressive they can't make ends meet. But I'd rather they are given a chance to contribute to society meaningfully rather than become the low-wage slaves to companies who are out to maximize profits and are under no pressure to adhere to current law. Right now, because employers are allowed to get away with paying undocumented workers under the table, the real harm is being done to the lower classes, whose wages get depressed by the competition.

One interesting option is that one of the penalties that would be part of a guest worker plan with a path to citizenship would essentially be community service. This would definitely be a penalty, one used in thousands of criminal cases annually, and would benefit the community and its crumbling infrastructure. But until you get comprehensive with a plan and address workplace enforcement, nothing will change. Of course, that would require the current Administration to actually stand up to Big Business rather than allow its party to demagogue about the "brown hordes." I don't expect the kind of leadership you would need to get illegal immigration under control. It would require picking on someone your own size instead of a poor person trying to do whatever he can for his family.

P.S. Mark Kleiman at "The Reality-Based Community" is on the same wavelength, and has this brilliant suggestion:

Big rewards — I'd propose green cards — for any illegal who turns in an employer for hiring him. You wouldn't have to actually give those rewards very often, because the threat of putting himself at his employee's mercy would discourage any sane employer from playing games.

There's more to the debate than enforcement, but that aspect has really been left out in the cold. These ideas make perfect sense.