The corporation that runs a group of restaurants partly owned by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper did the right thing Friday.
Wynkoop Holdings Inc. changed its hiring practices to make sure it finds out as quickly as possible if would-be workers have legitimate Social Security numbers.
The company also established a 30- day deadline for current employees to explain, if they are found to have numbers that don’t match their names, said Wynkoop Holdings’ chief executive, Lee Driscoll.
The moves come three weeks after an apparently undocumented employee of Hickenlooper’s Cherry Cricket restaurant allegedly murdered a Denver police officer.
The hiring reform seems more than coincidental, even though Raul Garcia- Gomez’s immigration status had nothing to do with his alleged killing of Detective Donald “Donnie” Young.
In fact, raw statistics should have driven these reforms long ago.
Last year, Driscoll revealed, the Social Security Administration determined that 107 people working in restaurants partly owned by the mayor had Social Security numbers that didn’t match their names.
“Of those,” said Driscoll, “52 still work at our restaurants.”
The others left because of natural turnover in the restaurant industry, not because Wynkoop cracked down.
Therein lies the trouble.
When roughly one of every seven people employed in the mayor’s empire of eateries isn’t legally documented, why should anyone else care about the law?
This problem touched Hickenlooper, even though he had ceded control of his restaurants to a blind trust.
It would have been a problem, whether or not an employee of one of the mayor’s restaurants became the prime suspect in a cop killing.
Standard practice in the restaurant industry didn’t get Hizzoner off the hook either.
The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The problem of illegal immigration in America is employer-driven as much as it is worker-driven.
So the Wynkoop move, while more like political damage control than preference, is still welcome.
Investing – as Wynkoop has now decided to – in technology that instantly checks names against Social Security numbers needs to be pro forma. Matching Social Security numbers with names before someone goes to work ought to be the rule.
Instead, it’s the exception.
So is making workers accountable after they have been found to have possibly falsified their papers.
Thousands of employers in the metro area have received Social Security notifications like the sent to Wynkoop, said Denver immigration lawyer Ann Allott.
They, too, should put a deadline on employees to prove they are legal. They, too, should go to instant checks of Social Security numbers.
Odds are good they won’t.
Odds are better the government won’t make them.
The law, Allott said, lets the Internal Revenue Service fine employers $100 a quarter for each employee whose name doesn’t match his or her Social Security number. That’s $400 a year per person, $40,000 a year in fines for 100 undocumented workers.
It would be a deterrent to hiring illegal immigrants if the government bothered to use it.
“The only employer sanctions I’ve heard of in years around here,” Allott said, “were out at Denver International Airport.”
If you don’t have a business close to a potential terrorist target, Allott continued, the government doesn’t care.
In turn, neither do employers. Once a year, the Social Security Administration issues letters of the kind Wynkoop received. Here’s how it works, Allott said: The letters only go to businesses where more than 10 percent of workers have Social Security numbers that don’t match their names. The government sent out notices to more than 1 million businesses in 2003.
And apparently never followed up.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
