It’s no secret that US immigration policy is a train wreck. The country has millions of undocumented workers performing jobs that Americans won’t fill, and these workers fill a critical gap in the US labor pool. The agriculture and hospitality industries are particularly dependent on this workforce, and employers in these industries are perpetually on pins and needles with regard to government enforcement of immigration and labor laws that are ineffective and, some would say, contrary to basic economic principles.
The game is changing for employers yet again. I’ll share with you an article posted on May 4th, 2009 by the American Staffing Association regarding the new administrations shift towards prosecution of employers who “knowingly hire undocumented workers.” What about the fact that workers have no way of determining whether or not documents produced were bona fide? Looks like the courts will sort it out.
From ASA Staffing Week, 5/4/2009
In an effort to crack down on immigrants working in the US illegally, the Department of Homeland Security intends to step up enforcement efforts against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
Under guidelines recently issues by DHS - and in a departure from previous practice - US Immigration and Customers Enforcement field agents will be instructed to target employers fro prosecution “through the use of carefully planned criminal investigations.”
In the past, most raids were conducted largely after tips that an employer was hiring illegal workers, rather than because investigators gleaned information from audits of employer records or undercover investigations. As a result, agents rounded up thousands of illegal immigrants but rarely acquired the evidence necessary to show whether businesses were knowingly hiring illegal workers.
Under the new guidelines, agents will be instructed to pursue evidence against an employer before going after its workers. Agents will be held to a higher standard of probable cause for conducting workplace raids, due in part to concern that past workplace raids were too dependent on speculative information.
The rules are likely to draw sharp criticism from employers, which argue that they are easily duped by workers with fake identity and work authorization documents and that the government has not established a reliable system for verifying work authorization status. Advocates of the rules say that by increasing scrutiny on employers, raids could result in fewer violations of workers rights.
Add this new policy to the growing administrative and regulatory burden that businesses already face. Immigration reform was a political football under the Bush administration, and the solution will only become more challenging as the US economy wallows in a prolonged economic malaise. Turning the cannons at employers is not the solution.