For Congress to take any immigration reform plan seriously next year, it must include some type of fraud-proof ID for all non-citizens seeking work.
The inherent flaws in the current employee verification process – a voluntary system, by the way – were exposed this past week as federal agents raided six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants across the country, including one in Greeley.
Swift uses Basic Pilot, the web-based federal program to help employers determine the legal status of would-be employees. It was designed to ferret out counterfeit green cards or fake Social Security numbers.
However, it can’t identify candidates who use stolen identities to get jobs – just one of the gaping holes in the system used by only 8,600 of the 5.6 million companies in this country. Basic Pilot also yields a high number of false-positives, meaning legal workers are being turned away because of computer errors.
In short, few companies are using it, and when they do, it often doesn’t work.
Most experts say bugs in the system could be worked out if there was political concensus to crack down on businesses that hire an illegal workforce.
Immigration is now mostly governed by a 1986 federal law, the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, but its employer regulations have been rarely enforced, which has led millions of Mexicans and other immigrant workers to enter the United States illegally looking for work.
Would-be employees now can present any of 27 kinds of documents to prove their legal status, which makes it hard for employers to tell who’s legal and who’s not, according to Richard Freeman, labor studies program director at the National Bureau of Economic Research. And it provides plenty of opportunity for fraud.
Congress should heed the lessons of history. Simpson-Mazzoli relied heavily on cracking down on the businesses that hired illegals, but it didn’t include an effective verification system because of controversy over development of what many deemed a national ID card. Instead, the law simply provoked rampant document fraud and a lucrative black market for IDs.
At that time, 29 different forms of ID could be used to determine eligibility. And to comply with an anti-discrimination component of the law, employers began to assume the documents were legit, rather than risk turning away and possibly discriminating against lawful employees.
It’s been hard to prove since that businesses knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and the motivation is clear enough – employers are always looking for an available labor pool, and newcomers whether legal or not are often will to start at low wages.
The system is a joke. Literally.
“The federal government conducted raids yesterday of illegal immigrants at Swift meat packing plants all around the country,” comedian Jay Leno said this week.
“It’s expected that the 1,300 illegal workers will be processed today, deported on Thursday, and hopefully back at work by Friday.”
Now, illegal workers make up about 5 percent of the U.S. workforce, and some Americans complain they’re taking jobs away from legal citizens or suppressing wage levels. However, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce no longer argues that illegal immigrants s are doing the jobs Americans don’t want to do. Its official line, according to Angelo Amador, director of immigration policy, is that America has a worker shortage.
We’ll soon find out if Swift can employ a workforce of legal employees.
