By Katie Rogers, Truth Staff
krogers@etruth.com
When a new employee is hired, businesses are supposed to do their part by making sure information presented by the worker on their Employment Eligibility Verification (I-9) form is accurate and valid.
But with an inestimable number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. work force, government agencies are attempting to crack down on employees who submit false documents and employers who look the other way.
A method gaining a lot of attention recently is the no-match letter process, in which the Social Security Administration mails documents notifying the employer that the employee's Social Security number and name does not correspond to SSA records.
Last month, legal action indefinitely restrained the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from sending out additional "Safe Harbor" letters with requirements that employers verify the validity of their employee's information within a certain time frame.
Brian Darling, director of Senate relations for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., said the halted process needs to be resumed.
"No-match letters have to go forward," Darling said. "It's one way of finding out if people are working at a business illegally. It's a step in the right direction."
Proponents for a comprehensive immigration reform feel differently.
"Our organization opposes the use of the no-match letter and immigration enforcement part of the equation," Brent Wilkes, national executive director for the League of United Latin American Citizens said. "We don't condone people misusing Social Security numbers and we'd rather the system were different, but why can't they come here legally in the first place?"
Wilkes added the ICE element to the no-match letters are in "violation of a long-standing separation" between the SSA and agencies of law enforcement, in this case the DHS and ICE.
As a less aggressive message than the no-match letter, the office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services encourages employers to use a voluntary online process called E-Verify to check employee documents.
E-Verify runs Social Security information against SSA and DHS databases. According to USCIS, around 23,000 employers already use E-Verify. Groups such as the Washington D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies say the process should be mandatory.
"It would make it much harder for illegal aliens to be employed," CIS senior policy analyst Jessica Vaughan said. "It makes it harder for illegal aliens to deceive the employers and it makes it harder for employers to look the other way."
Legislation has been introduced to make E-Verify standard, said Vaughan, and the president's Fiscal Year 2008 budget request includes $30 million to expand the program, according to USCIS. USCIS does not currently have the capability to detect when Social Security numbers are being used multiple times, but steps are being taken to develop that technology, said Vaughan.
Another path a business can take to ensure the legality of its workers is by enrolling in the ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers. A greater commitment than participating in E-Verify, the business would submit to an I-9 audit by ICE and verify the Social Security numbers of their existing labor forces by using the Social Security Number Verification System. Eight employers and a trade association are signed up to use IMAGE since the program was implemented in January, according to Tim Counts, a spokesman for ICE out of the Bloomington, Minn., office.
"It's a fairly serious commitment by employers," Counts said.
Counts said that ICS itself has a new focus on criminally prosecuting employers and employees suspected of violating immigration law, engaging in fraud or falsely using identity documents.
ICE bringing criminal charges against employers is "definitely a wake-up call," Counts said. And, as ICE continues to present IMAGE to employer groups and trade shows, Counts expects the number of enrollments in the program to go up.
Allert Brown-Gort, associate director of the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, said that attempts to simply remove all illegal workers is not wise.
"Five percent of the work force is undocumented," Brown-Gort said. "If you yank all those workers out, it'll cause social destruction, not to mention business destruction. You put in the ingredients for runaway inflation."
Brown-Gort added that the "supply," or immigrant, sector of the population garnered the most focus, but the "demand" side is rarely considered.
"A lot of employers really count on those workers," he said. "A lot of consumers really count on those workers except they don't really know about them. You don't really see the person in the kitchen when you go out to eat."
Truth reporter Tim Vandenack contributed to this story.