Washington – Immigration raids at Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in Colorado and five other states illuminated flaws in the government’s system for verifying workers’ legal status, several senators said Monday.
Senators from states where Swift plants were raided called for fixes to the now-voluntary Basic Pilot program.
The system tells employers whether a worker’s Social Security number is valid, but it fails to catch when a Social Security number is being used simultaneously at more than one job.
Swift used the Basic Pilot system to check information provided by workers, hundreds of whom now face criminal charges such as identity theft. Company officials said the program did not alert them to problems with information provided by any of those employees.
“I can’t imagine a system that would be better designed to fail in our current laws when it comes to identity theft and employee verification,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “What this reveals is basic flaws in our system of employee verification.”
Senators talked about Basic Pilot after meeting behind closed doors with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., called the meeting to ask Chertoff what prompted the December raids of Swift plants in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Utah. Immigration agents arrested 1,297 Swift workers.
After the meeting, Chertoff also criticized Basic Pilot and repeated his frequent call for Congress to pass a guest-worker program, which he said would “answer the economic need” for people willing to fill certain jobs, and “bring much of the illegal immigration into the light.”
The Democratic-controlled Congress is expected to pass some type of immigration reform, but what it will include isn’t clear.
As of June, the voluntary Basic Pilot program was used by an estimated 10,000 businesses out of an estimated 7 million nationwide.
The Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service say they are legally precluded from sharing taxpayer information with the Department of Homeland Security.
Legislation that would have allowed those federal agencies to alert immigration officials of suspicious activity passed the Senate last year. But that legislation never became law. The House – which had passed a very different immigration reform package – would not negotiate with the Senate to merge the two bills.
Even though the limitations of Basic Pilot were known, the facts surrounding the arrests made at Swift personalize the problem, Cornyn said.
“What this demonstrates is that the problem is far more pervasive, far deeper than just ‘Does this Social Security number have a person whose name is associated with it at the Social Security Administration?”‘ Cornyn said.
In Colorado, the legislature mandated Basic Pilot’s use to check the status of all people applying for driver’s licenses and welfare benefits.
Joan Vecchi, director of the motor vehicle division in the Colorado Department of Revenue, said the program has successfully detected cases of people using counterfeit documents.
“The program is only as good as the data that gets into it,” Vecchi said. “…It could be better if their data entry was caught up.”
In addition to questioning the effectiveness of Basic Pilot, senators said they were concerned that raiding a business that is using the government’s verification system might discourage other companies from using it.
“We’re sending a lot of conflicting signals here to companies,” said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn.
Staff writers Christa Marshall and Mark Couch contributed to this report.
