Judge Calls on DHS, Justice to Improve Legal Proceedings for Non-Citizens
By Chris Strohm
GovExec.com, July 29, 2005
A federal judge on Friday urged the Homeland Security and Justice departments to improve legal proceedings for noncitizens in order to better ensure them due process of law.
Judge Raymond Fisher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said immigration proceedings are swamping his court, administrative records are very poor and illegal aliens often do not have proper legal representation.
'If the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and the court system can have avenues of communication about how immigration cases are processed ... that would improve the process,' Fisher said at the American Constitution Society's annual conference in Washington.
'The Mike Chertoffs and the Alberto Gonzaleses need to hear it and get invested in it and make it a priority,' Fisher said during a panel session. 'It can work. The system can be made to work.' Chertoff is the DHS secretary and Gonzales is the attorney general.
'You try to make the system run smoothly and fairly so that we can spend our time focusing on the real issues in a case,' he added.
Immigration proceedings against illegal immigrants are usually initiated by DHS or Justice law enforcement officials. A Justice immigration judge makes an initial determination in legal proceedings against the noncitizen. But Fisher said immigration judges do not have the staff to handle the high case volume, meaning that administrative records often are not complete and are done months after the case is decided. The Ninth Circuit court becomes involved when an illegal immigrant appeals a case.
Fisher said the Ninth Circuit now faces an enormous quantity of immigration cases, including more than 5,400 last year.
'This is a new phenomenon. I never decided an immigration case until about two years ago, or three years ago,' he said. 'This whole area of law has sort of bubbled up in intensity, both because of the enormity of the onslaught of cases, plus ... 9/11 and the sensitivity to immigrants that we now have with respect to national security. It's a whole new landscape.'
Bush Wants Immigration Bill In Fall
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times, July 28, 2005
President Bush yesterday told House Republicans that he wants them to pass an immigration bill this fall, but members said he may not get a bill he likes.
Mr. Bush, speaking to a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill, said immigration reform is part of his agenda, and his deadline gives a boost to those looking for a guest-worker program.
'It's great,' said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, who is sponsoring an immigration overhaul that would give those already here illegally a multistep, 11-year path to citizenship. His bill also would allow in 400,000 guest workers per year and also put them on a multistep path to citizenship.
Mr. Flake said his bill gives the House a way to meet the president's deadline.
'Ours is a bipartisan bill, and we're ready, and I think the [House Republican] Conference is, as well,' Mr. Flake said.
The bill, which is the preferred solution of many immigrant advocacy groups, also is advancing in the Senate, sponsored by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat.
But other Republicans said rushing to meet Mr. Bush's schedule would jeopardize other priorities.
'If you load up the agenda with a big immigration bill, that's going to be a problem for Social Security,' one Republican congressman said.
Kevin Madden, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, said it's 'too early to put a timetable' on when a bill could come before the House, but said Mr. DeLay hopes Republicans can agree on something that can pass 'sooner rather than later.'
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, told reporters recently that a bill could not be done this year, but he wants to bring one up by next summer.
The president did not go into specifics at yesterday's meeting, several Republicans said. But Mr. Bush previously has called for a guest-worker program that matches workers with employers who say they cannot fill those jobs with Americans. He also called for an increase in the level of legal immigration.
But he has not submitted a bill or clarified what happens to current illegal aliens, who would be eligible for his worker program, when their time in the program is over.
The president's call for a worker program puts him on a collision course with Mr. DeLay, who has said the House will first pass an immigration security and enforcement bill and then later pass a worker program.
A host of House Republicans agreed.
'I believe we need to work very quickly and effectively on behalf of the American people for added border security -- an immigration bill that does enforcement first,' said Rep. J.D. Hayworth, Arizona Republican. 'The people demand it.'
He said Americans are fed up with worker plans that include promises of enforcement measures that are never met.
But Mr. Flake said such a two-step plan never will work, because any enforcement program would deprive businesses of workers and would leave them needing a way to fill those job slots. Thus, any bill that passes will have to have both enforcement and a worker program, he said.
'The notion that you can do piecemeal reform is quickly being dismissed,' he said.
Immigration Overhaul Seen as Key to Domestic Security
By Nicole Gaouette
Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, portraying immigration policy as a vital weapon against terrorism, pledged Wednesday to tighten border security but also called on Congress to approve a guest worker program that would make it easier for foreign workers to enter the country legally.
'We must gain full control of our borders to prevent illegal immigration and security breaches,' Chertoff said.
But, he added, 'control of the border will also require reducing the demand for illegal border migration' by channeling needed workers through a new legal system. Implicit in the guest worker program would be an increase in the number of legal immigrants.
Chertoff vowed to carry his campaign for a guest worker program as well as other changes to Capitol Hill in the weeks ahead.
By linking the controversial subject of immigration policy to the popular goal of thwarting terrorists, Chertoff's plan could give new impetus to President Bush's stalled proposal for an expanded guest worker program and enhanced border security.
And, by linking the guest worker plan to calls for tougher border controls, the plan could mollify those conservative Republicans in Congress who had opposed such programs on grounds that enforcement must come first.
Revamping immigration has been a difficult issue for the Bush administration politically. It pits many business-oriented Republicans, who favor ready access to immigrant workers, against social conservatives, who express outrage at the ease with which immigrants evade U.S. laws.
Initial reaction from some congressional conservatives suggested Chertoff would not have an easy sell with Congress.
'His chances are slim to none over here,' said Rep. Thomas G. Tancredo (R-Colo.), who founded and leads the pro-enforcement Immigration Reform Caucus in the House.
'It's so annoying,' he said, speaking of the White House and Chertoff. 'They've taken our rhetoric, they're using the right words -- enforcement, security. What they're really describing is, 'if we make everybody legal, we'll have solved the problem of illegal immigration in this country.' They use the right words, they just don't do the right thing.'
Not all Republicans are as hostile to the administration's approach as Tancredo, but he and other critics of the administration approach have been able to block action so far.
Chertoff's proposals for beefing up border controls and reshaping the agencies responsible for them may get a better reception.
'Without question the most difficult problem the department has to face is immigration enforcement,' said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. 'It's of vital importance.
'The INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] bureaucracy that the new department inherited was roundly deemed dysfunctional,' he said. 'The Homeland Security Act reconstituted the pieces of the INS in new ways [but] the last few years have shown that the organizational changes themselves were not enough.'
Chertoff's pitch for new immigration laws is part of a package of proposals for streamlining and tightening up the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, which was rushed into being two years ago as part the federal government's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
With 183,000 workers pulled together from 22 federal agencies, the department has been widely regarded as a bulky bureaucracy that needs top-to-bottom reorganization.
Chertoff, a hard-driving former prosecutor and senior Justice Department official, outlined a sweeping program of organizational and other changes in the agency's structure, operations and priorities.
In remarks delivered to an auditorium crowded with department officials, terrorism experts and others with a stake in department policy, Chertoff identified his top priorities as preparation for catastrophic attacks, information sharing with state and local partners and transportation security, along with overhauling immigration and restructuring the department's intelligence unit.
'Our department must drive improvement with a sense of urgency,' he said.
'Our enemy constantly changes and adapts, so we as a department must be nimble and decisive.'
Chertoff described his proposals, which include creating positions and eliminating some bureaucratic layers, as 'modest but essential course corrections' that would yield 'big dividends.'
Most of the reorganizing can be accomplished administratively, he said, but some will require congressional action.
Chertoff said he was working with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to 'ease the path for those who wish to visit, study and conduct business in this country.'
At the same time, as part of a package of changes designed to give the department more precise information on who was entering the country, he proposed more fingerprinting of first-time visitors.
Taken together, such steps -- along with immigration changes -- seemed designed to ease the passage of most travelers, who pose little or no threat, and enable federal agents to focus more closely on those whose backgrounds were unclear or aroused suspicion.
In some areas, Chertoff wants to create positions, including an assistant secretary for cyber and telecommunications security and another assistant secretary to head a new policy division. Shortly after Chertoff's speech, the White House nominated Stewart A. Baker, a UCLA law school graduate and former general counsel for the National Security Agency, to be assistant secretary for policy.
Chertoff also announced the creation of a chief intelligence officer, a position he said would help fuse more than 10 offices within Homeland Security that produced intelligence.
That officer would head a beefed-up information analysis division that would report directly to the secretary and be the primary connection to other groups in the intelligence community.
In other divisions, Chertoff proposed eliminating layers of middle management, including the Border and Transportation Security Directorate, which oversees agencies that do most of the hands-on work of dealing with the nation's immigration challenges.
The directorate's three components -- Border Patrol; Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is responsible for internal immigration enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection -- would report directly to the secretary or the undersecretary.
Chertoff also announced plans to:
* Turn the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which deals primarily with hurricanes and other natural disasters, into a free-standing unit. It is now merged with the directorate responsible for preparedness against terrorism.
* Move the Federal Air Marshals organization, which has chafed against the buttoned-down management style of the former Secret Service officials who now run it, into the more flexible environs of the Transportation Security Administration.
* Create a position of a chief medical officer to better coordinate the department's work with the agencies primarily responsible for security issues involving health, such as stocking vaccines and preparing to deal with bio-terrorist incidents.
Chertoff's audience of Washington insiders interrupted his speech once, to applaud the news that passengers using the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport would no longer be required to stay seated for 30 minutes before arrival or after takeoff.
Bill Gives Illegals Temporary Status
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times, July 20, 2005
Two key senators yesterday introduced an immigration bill that would give illegal aliens five years of temporary legal status before making them return to their home country, from where they could apply for a new guest-worker program open to any foreigner who qualifies.
The measure has a leg up on the other proposals because it was written by Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican and chairman of the Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee, and Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican and a member of the Republican Senate leadership.
As the guest-worker debate heats up in Congress, the new bill's sponsors said their version stands out by combining strong enforcement with the worker program.
'The key here is enforcement of the law and a law that can be enforced,' Mr. Kyl said, while Mr. Cornyn called it 'a work-and-return program, not a work-and-stay program,' and said it closely tracks the principles that President Bush laid out in a speech 18 months ago.
On the enforcement side, it would boost border-enforcement efforts as well as add 10,000 agents to conduct work site checks and go after companies that hire illegal aliens.
On the immigration side, the bill creates a guest-worker program, open to anyone overseas, to fill jobs for which employers say they cannot find American workers.
Workers could come for two years, then must return home for a year. They could apply for three total work periods. Current illegal aliens would have to leave the U.S. within five years, but could then apply for the temporary-worker plan from their home countries.
The Cornyn-Kyl bill joins a proposal by Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, as the leading options in the Senate. The McCain-Kennedy bill increases immigration by 400,000 workers a year and offers illegal aliens a chance to pay a fine and be put on a multistep path to citizenship.
All sides agree that momentum for reforming immigration is growing in Congress, but it's not clear whether the enforcement side or the legalization side has the upper hand.
Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Kyl said the McCain-Kennedy bill can't win the confidence of voters because it lacks strong enforcement provisions. Mr. Cornyn also dismissed a bill announced Monday by Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, which has enforcement provisions but does not specifically address illegal aliens' status.
'I suspect Congressman Tancredo is really not serious about his guest-worker bill if he says we've got to have 100 percent enforcement of current law, and deportation, I suppose, of 10 million people,' Mr. Cornyn said.
Mr. Bush has not endorsed a specific plan.
Still, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean accused Mr. Bush of not standing up 'to the anti-immigrant forces in his own party.'
'The president's absolute lack of leadership on the issue has caused an atmosphere of hostility and fear that's keeping us from real and comprehensive immigration reform. His own party doesn't know where he stands,' Mr. Dean told the National Council of La Raza yesterday.
The Kyl-Cornyn plan does appear to retreat on the two senators' earlier promise to delay the start of a guest-worker plan until the government first met certain enforcement benchmarks.
In May, the two senators said the government must first earn the trust of the American people on enforcement. In a summary of the provisions released at the time, the senators said increases in both the U.S. Border Patrol and detention beds must 'be fully funded before any new temporary worker program.'
Yesterday Mr. Kyl said that summary was incorrect.
'I don't recall that. I'm sorry if that impression was created,' he said.
Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, said Mr. Cornyn has correctly diagnosed the problem but his solution 'is mostly sticks with few carrots.' She and the American Immigration Lawyers Association said they prefer the McCain-Kennedy bill.
The bill was more cautiously received by the other side of the debate. The Federation for American Immigration Reform said it had many good elements, but the history of such proposals is sobering.
'When it comes to immigration policy, the promises made to the immigrants invariably get kept, but the commitment to the American public to protect our borders, security, and jobs too often fall by the wayside,' said Dan Stein, federation president.
Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who wrote the 1996 immigration bill, said the bill is not an amnesty. But he said the broad nature of the worker program is bad news for American workers' wages.
Fingerprint Mystery: They Don't Change, But They Do Expire
By Barry Newman
The Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2005; Pg. A1
NEW YORK -- Good news for immigrants: If you're applying for a green card or for citizenship, the federal government is determined to stop notifying you that your fingerprints have 'expired.'
How do fingerprints expire? The official notices don't say. They just give applicants appointments to get fingerprinted again.
At an immigration office in downtown Brooklyn one Friday, scores of them sat on plastic chairs waiting to be called to a high-tech fingerprint station. For some, it would be their fourth time.
'I don't know why,' said a woman from Poland, studying her hands. Behind her, two Orthodox Jews read prayer books. Above her, cartoons played on a television screen. 'Maybe something happened with my fingers. They check, make sure everything is fine.'
The official rationale isn't that intuitive, but it does peel back a corner of the electronic security blanket that the government is struggling to tuck around the U.S. immigration bureaucracy.
People who want to stay in America are fingerprinted to make sure they aren't criminals. Pre-computer, the Immigration and Naturalization Service carted its ink-on-paper prints to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There, experts searched files for matches against the prints of known criminals, just as they would for prints left on martini glasses at crime scenes: narrowing them down through a series of ever-smaller categories that have been in use for more than a century. A name check wouldn't do; criminals change their names. Immigrants with clean records quickly got green cards. Then the FBI threw their paper fingerprints out.
Five years ago, fingerprint computers replaced ink and paper. But the computers had no significant storage capacity. They merely sent prints on phone lines to the FBI. The FBI checked the prints for criminal matches on its own new computers -- and deleted them. The reason was less technical than bureaucratic: Paper fingerprints were trashed in the past, why save digital fingerprints now?
After Sept. 11, 2001, the immigration service was folded into the Department of Homeland Security, and the time it took to grant or deny permanent residence to a foreigner kept growing longer. While waiting, applicants might commit crimes. Without double-checking the FBI's fingerprint files, immigration clerks would never know.
Wouldn't it be handy, the government realized, if those digital prints were stored after all? Retooling the system for storage took until 2003. The next step was to create a search program -- using images, not words -- to retrieve the prints. That component of the project isn't quite ready.
'The easy part was placing them in a repository,' says William Yates, who runs this operation at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, now part of the DHS. 'The more difficult thing is a mechanism to allow those prints to be called back up. Right now, we don't have that capability.'
So immigrants with applications bottled up in bureaucracy keep on reporting to be fingerprinted over and over. 'It's stupid and it costs a huge amount of money,' says Margaret Stock, a professor of national security law at West Point. 'It doesn't make any sense if you realize that fingerprints don't change.'
Taking fingerprints is an old routine when it comes to permanent immigrants. When it began, about 50 years ago, immigration clerks did the job. But after an amnesty for illegals unleashed a horde of green-card applicants in 1986, the chore was farmed out to private shops -- and fingerprints got out of hand.
'A criminal alien with his own ink pad could take someone else's prints and submit them as his own,' the Justice Department reported in 1994. Hurrying through its paperwork, the immigration service often didn't wait to hear from the FBI. In 1996, it came out that tens of thousands of newly minted citizens had arrest records.
That was the end of private fingerprinting. The FBI has since computerized its files, and the immigration service has opened 130 special fingerprint offices. Under a $370 million government contract signed in 1999, they are staffed and run by Vinnell Corp., a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corp. that specializes in logistical support and also happens to train the personal army of Saudi Arabia's royal family.
At the Brooklyn office, Sue Leichter, a Vinnell technician, was showing off the Identix Inc. 'TouchPrint' scanner, with the help of a taxi driver from Morocco who was applying for a green card.
As Ms. Leichter pressed his fingers to a glass plate, the man's prints came up on a screen, loops and whorls in brilliant black and white. A box on the screen turned green, and the prints zipped to the FBI. The taxi driver preferred not to give his name, but he took his treatment in stride.
'It's my fourth time,' he said.
Grinning at him, Ms. Leichter said, 'Welcome back!'
The FBI now tells the immigration service in just a few days whether someone is under a criminal cloud. The immigration service, though, doesn't always put the final touches on its paperwork so speedily.
'It should take three hours,' says Rajiv Khanna, an immigration lawyer in Virginia. 'Do you know how much time it takes?'
The answer, in some parts of the country, is three years. The government is working mightily to reduce its chronic backlog. But often it can't work fast enough to beat an expiring fingerprint.
In three years, fingerprints expire twice. A set lasts just 15 months -- that is the rule.
An applicant is first fingerprinted after qualifying for a green card, which itself can take years. If it then takes more than 15 months for the immigration service to complete the paperwork and issue the card, the applicant is fingerprinted once more.
Those who go on to apply for citizenship are fingerprinted again. People seeking asylum often wait for at least a decade; every 15 months, they are fingerprinted.
The 15-month rule has been around for years. Not even Mr. Yates at the immigration service can explain it.
'It happened so long ago,' he says. 'There's no technical reason for it.'
With computers that store and actually retrieve fingerprints, Mr. Yates imagines a day when fresh arrest records pop up on his screens daily, and fingerprints never expire again. Such seamless feedback from the FBI isn't even being planned, but it sure would have made Ali Al-Shankiti's passage to America less confusing.
He is a 29-year-old Saudi Arabian who came to the U.S. in 1993, earned three degrees, and now does research in wireless computer technology for a big company in Boston. In 2002, based on his job, he was cleared for a green card. On April 4, he was fingerprinted. His expiration notice came 15 months later.
'I'm not the most favored immigrant,' Mr. Al-Shankiti says. 'I do understand that. Still, I thought, how do fingerprints expire?'
On the day of his second fingerprinting appointment, he had to be away. He wrote in advance asking for a another date. Months passed with no reply. On Aug. 26, 2003, Mr. Al-Shankiti went in unannounced.
'They were happy to print me,' he says. But then came a letter with yet another fingerprinting appointment for Sept. 27.
Mr. Al-Shankiti went. A month later, he was told to come back again; it seemed the FBI computer couldn't read his prints. So on Dec. 9, 2003, Mr. Al-Shankiti was fingerprinted for the fourth time.
For 18 months, he heard nothing else. Finally, he telephoned the immigration service to let a clerk know that his fingerprints had expired. This past Monday, he got a notice in the mail giving him an appointment on July 23 -- for his fifth fingerprinting.
Mr. Al-Shankiti is allowed to keep working, as long as the immigration service issues him an employment authorization card each year. The cards, designed to be forgery-proof, carry a photo and one fingerprint. Though Mr. Al-Shankiti has had several cards, his latest is strange. He is at a loss to explain it, and so is a spokesman for the Homeland Security Department.
The place on the employment card where his fingerprint belongs has a stamp instead. It says: 'Fingerprint not available.'
GOP Seeks To Heal Rift On Migrants
By Patrick O'Connor
The Hill, June 15, 2005
House Republican leaders are trying to bridge a deep divide on immigration reform before they schedule a vote on the controversial issue later this year.
To that end, Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, will soon begin hosting dinners for small groups of Republican Conference members to discuss immigration as the House Judiciary Committee crafts its bill.
Shadegg is modeling these meals on the Unity Dinners that were first arranged by then-Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) during the early years of the so-called Republican Revolution. Armey created the dinners as a way to build agreement between conference members who were on different sides of a divisive issue.
'The goal will be to achieve consensus,' Shadegg told The Hill yesterday. 'It's a complex issue.'
Immigration reform was the subject of a lengthy conversation during the whip meeting Monday night, according to GOP staff members with knowledge of the meeting. The members, led by Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Chief Deputy Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), discussed both the need to act on immigration reform and a few of the different reform ideas.
Immigration reform is particularly thorny for congressional Republicans because it divides members who back the increased enforcement of current immigration laws and supporters of agriculture, construction and the service industry who favor a broader guest-worker program. Supporters of an expanded guest-worker program include President Bush and powerful business interests such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Last week, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) told a group of Hispanic reporters that the House would vote on an immigration-reform bill before the end of the year. At the briefing, he said Shadegg would be responsible for coordinating the internal debate.
Shadegg plans to hold the first of these dinners before the July 4 recess. He will then host another dinner every week or two until a bill is introduced in the House Judiciary Committee. In the beginning, Shadegg said, he will invite 'a dozen or so' members on every side of the issue to discuss their preferences for reform. No outside interest groups will be included.
Hastert has already committed to attending at least one of the dinners, Shadegg said, and Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) is expected to attend most of the others. In addition, the Policy Committee will work closely with Judiciary staff in shaping the debate during the dinners so that members will discuss the issues most relevant to Sensenbrenner and his committee advisers.
'Our goal is to assist Mr. Sensenbrenner,' Shadegg said. 'The Judiciary Committee will be charged with writing this bill. We'll talk closely.'
Shadegg has already divided the issue into four broad topics: border enforcement, interior enforcement, employer enforcement and the question about what to do with workers who are already in this country. But he was quick to point out that this initial list is in no way binding.
'It's going to be an open process,' Shadegg said.
The dinners are not meant to be organized debates. 'People come to these things with firm views,' Shadegg said. Instead, the goal is to find common ground among the conference's many disparate viewpoints.
Sensenbrenner has already been working on immigration reform, and yesterday his committee announced that it will hold a hearing next Tuesday on the issue of workplace enforcement and employer sanctions. The hearing will address some of the enforcement shortfalls in the workplace and the lack of fines levied against employers of illegal immigrants.
Most of those requirements were established by the Simpson-Mazzolli Act of 1986, which instituted fines and sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants while also granting a one-time amnesty to illegal workers already in this country. Those laws have since become difficult to enforce as the country's population of illegal immigrants - and the business community's reliance on their labor - has continued to grow.
'The lack of employer sanctions is largely responsible for creating the mess we have now,' said Jeff Lungren, a spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee.
Before dealing with immigration reform, the Judiciary Committee must first finish its work on an extension of the Patriot Act and move a bill to create a registry for sex offenders to the House floor.
In preparing for the dinners, Shadegg spoke with Reps. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) and Mark Souder (R-Ind.), who organized attendees during the Armey era on behalf of centrists and conservatives, respectively.
Shadegg first observed the effectiveness of Unity Dinners during his initial two terms in the House, when Armey used them to address proposed cuts to the National Endowment of the Arts. Members were starkly divided on the matter, with some wanting to abolish the organization and others hoping to increase its funding. Republicans finally agreed to 'clean up' the endowment's organizational bureaucracy.
Shadegg wants to bring that same free exchange to these dinners as the separate sides work to build consensus. Given the sensitivity of those discussions, Shadegg said, he does not expect to include outside interests.
'It's not an outsider-driven process,' he said. 'It's a people-in-the-room process.'
Few Firms Use Migrant ID Service
By Daniel González
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix), June 11, 2005
As political pressure mounts for stricter enforcement of laws against hiring undocumented workers, some employers are turning to a little-known federal program that allows them to weed out workers who seek jobs using fake documents.
The 8-year-old program, which in December was expanded to all 50 states, allows employers to verify workers' employment eligibility by logging onto a government Web site and checking their documents against Social Security and immigration databases.
The program is intended to fix one of the biggest problems the government faces in trying to crack down on illegal immigration: the prolific use of counterfeit documents by undocumented workers.
'I have an answer back within a minute,' said Martin Thompson, vice president for human resources at Bar-S Foods Co., a Phoenix-based meat-processing company that has participated in the program since 1998.
So far, however, Thompson's company is in the minority. Few employers are taking advantage of the program, mostly because it is voluntary but also because it has not been well-publicized.
Nationwide, just 4,385 employers are participating, said Chris Bentley, spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees the Basic Pilot Employment Verification Program. That is just a fraction of the 5.7 million companies counted by the U.S. census in 2002, the most recent data available.
In Arizona, 101 employers have enrolled of 96,000 companies counted by the census.
'I'm not sure most employers even know about this program,' said Farrell Quinlan, spokesman for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce.
Most employers would be relieved to have a system that allowed them to easily verify a worker's eligibility, Quinlan said.
He pointed out that the current system places employers in a Catch-22 between unwittingly hiring undocumented workers using fake documents and opening themselves to discrimination charges by turning away immigrant workers whom they suspect are using fake documents.
The national debate heating up over immigration reform also may be hurting participation in the program, Quinlan said.
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., recently introduced a bill calling for a guest-worker program that would include a biometric card to allow employers to verify a worker's employment eligibility.
'Until there is better understanding of what is effective and what is available, participation will remain below what one might want,' Quinlan said.
Congress created the program in 1997, rolling it out first in California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and New York, states with the highest numbers of undocumented immigrants, Bentley said.
Not mandatory
In 1999, Congress expanded the program to Nebraska at the request of the state's meatpacking industry, and then to all 50 states, Bentley said.
Participating in the program puts employers at a competitive disadvantage with companies that continue to hire undocumented workers, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., research organization that favors tighter limits on immigration. Unless it's mandatory, participation will remain low, he said.
'If it's applied to everyone, all the businesses would be on an even playing field,' Krikorian said.
Congress, however, has avoided making the program mandatory under pressure from business interests, he said.
'That's the real problem with this,' said Thompson, of Bar-S. 'If a person is illegal and doesn't have the proper documents, then they just go down the road to the next employer.'
Although based in Phoenix, Bar-S was eligible to participate early on because some of its 1,500 workers are in California and Texas.
The program is helping Bar-S weed out undocumented workers, Thompson said. Before a new employee is hired, he or she is asked to provide a Social Security number and other documents, just like in the past. But now, that information is plugged into a computer to see if it matches federal databases.
If the documentation is rejected, Bar-S tells the worker, who is then given a chance to correct any mistakes. Undocumented workers usually don't come back, Thompson said.
Thompson said word has gotten out that the company is using the program. As a result, fewer undocumented workers are applying for jobs at Bar-S.
'Less than 8 percent of the time we will find someone where the computer kicks them back,' down from 30 percent when the company first began using the program in 1998, he said.
By participating, the company hopes to avoid potential audits by federal immigration inspectors, which can be costly, he said.
A 1986 law passed by Congress makes it illegal for employers to knowingly hire undocumented workers and requires them to check the work-eligibility documents of all new employees.
A 'mockery'
But the law does not require employers to verify whether the documents are real. As long as the documents appear to be legitimate, then the employer has met his or her responsibility under the law, said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in Laguna Niguel, Calif.
Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind., told a House subcommittee in May that the easy availability of fake documents has made a 'mockery' of the law.
'Fake documents are produced by the millions and can be obtained cheaply,' Hostettler said.
The existing system, he said, benefits unscrupulous employers by allowing them to look the other way and accept documents they know are fake. At the same time, it harms businesses that want to follow the law but end up having to accept documents they know are likely bogus to protect themselves against discrimination complaints.
On 16th Street and Roosevelt Street in Phoenix and on many other Valley street corners, fake Social Security and permanent residency cards can be bought for as little as $70 a pair from men hawking micas, Spanish slang for bogus documents.
There were about 7 million undocumented workers in the United States last year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C.
A 2004 study by the Center for Immigration Studies said about 55 percent of them were hired using bogus documents with fabricated Social Security numbers or stolen numbers.
On a recent morning, Roy Jares illustrated the conundrum employers face by reaching into his desk and pulling out a Social Security card and a Resident Alien card belonging to a newly hired employee.
Jares is president and owner of Steel Masters Inc., a Phoenix company that manufactures stairs and railings for apartment complexes. He employs 22 workers, mostly Latino immigrants.
Jares said it was impossible for him to tell whether the documents were real.
'How do I know whether I am hiring illegal immigrants?' Jares asked, waving the cards in the air. 'I can't tell you if these documents are real or not. So if immigration comes to my office, how am I going to know?'
Jares said he had never heard of the program to verify a worker's employment eligibility.
Stricter enforcement
Meanwhile, there is a growing clamor to focus more enforcement efforts on employers, not just undocumented workers.
From 1995 to 2003, the number of businesses fined for immigration violations declined to 124 from 909.
In April, a Democratic state lawmaker called for provisions that would have suspended the business licenses of employers in Arizona who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants.
The provisions, which opponents killed, were in response to several Republican-sponsored bills denying certain state benefits to undocumented immigrants.
'This is a supply-and-demand issue,' said state Sen. Bill Brotherton of Phoenix, who introduced the provisions. But most efforts to crack down on illegal immigration focus on undocumented immigrants, not the employers who hire them, he said.
In April, Arizona GOP Sen. Jon Kyl also called for stricter enforcement of laws against hiring undocumented workers saying, 'Employers pretend that they're not employing illegal immigrants, but they know they are. . . . And the government pretends to enforce the law. But it knows that the documents in many cases are counterfeit.'
Immigration Emerges as Republican Divider
By John Harwood
The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2005; Pg. A4
While Washington displays partisan divisions over judges and John Bolton, Congress turns this week to immigration , a topic that could split President Bush's governing coalition from within.
Because its implications for the nation's economy, security and its social fabric pit Republican constituencies against one another, the issue could imperil the party more than anything Democrats could do on their own.
Nearly everyone the immigration system touches -- including Mr. Bush, the guards on America's Southern border, and employers dependent on illegal workers -- agrees change is needed. Now, Republican lawmakers from states most affected aim to tackle the volatile issue.
Today, two Senate Judiciary subcommittees hold a joint hearing on the need to fix what Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas calls a 'badly broken' immigration system. Mr. Cornyn and his Republican colleague from Arizona, Sen. Jon Kyl, soon plan to introduce a broad legislative proposal.
Perhaps even more politically promising, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona last week introduced a bipartisan measure with Democrat Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, among others. A companion bill, also with bipartisan sponsorship, is being offered in the House by Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe and Illinois Democrat Luis Gutierrez, among others.
It is no surprise that border-state lawmakers figure prominently in the effort. The Pew Hispanic Center in Washington estimates the U.S. has some 11 million undocumented residents. Roughly six in 10 of those illegal immigrants hail from Mexico, the center says, dwarfing the number of Mexican immigrants entering the U.S. legally. Of the 1.1 million people caught by the Border Patrol trying to enter the country illegally in 2004, Mr. McCain says, half were apprehended in Arizona.
But the breadth of Mr. McCain's proposal, and its potential to split his party, underscores the challenge of getting it enacted. It would invest more in border security through technology such as unmanned aerial vehicles, while creating an 'essential worker' H-5A visa for immigrants willing to fill low-skilled jobs that Americans won't take. Applicants would have to show that a job is waiting for them, pay a $500 fee, and clear security and medical checks.
Undocumented workers already here could register for a temporary H-5B visa that would be good for as long as six years. To qualify for permanent legal status, they would have to clear security checks, pay back taxes and a $2,000 fee, and learn English. Hospitals caring for illegal immigrants would be eligible for federal reimbursement.
'This is not an amnesty bill,' Mr. McCain declared on the Senate floor as he introduced the legislation. Yet Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, a leader among conservative Republicans who favor tougher policies, denounced the proposal as tantamount to amnesty.
Smoothing the path toward legal status is popular with the Republican party's business constituency, from agribusiness executives to a tourism industry with many hotels and restaurants that can't operate without illegal immigrants. It is also popular among the Hispanic swing voters whom Mr. Bush and strategist Karl Rove recognize as vital to lasting Republican dominance.
Yet as Mr. Tancredo's criticism suggests, it is toxic to the party's socially conservative base. In a new dissection of the American electorate by the Pew Research Center, an affiliate of the Pew Hispanic Center, 53% of free-market Republican 'enterprisers' say rising immigration 'strengthens American society.' But an overwhelming 68% of social conservatives say it 'threatens traditional American customs and values.'
Such opposition propelled House conservatives to toughen driver's-license requirements with the so-called Real ID provision of the emergency defense-spending bill that Mr. Bush signed last week. It is also reflected in the recent warning from conservative magazine National Review, in a cover story [by CIS executive director Mark Krikorian] blasting amnesty and 'temporary visa' programs, that 'the silent majority on immigration is becoming increasingly restive and vocal.'
Democrats face potentially dangerous internal splits as well. Their dominant bloc of affluent, well-educated liberals embraces immigration as part of cultural diversity. 'We are a nation of immigrants, and we always will be,' Mr. Kennedy said in offering the bill with Mr. McCain.
But some poor Democrats, including many African-Americans who look askance at the swelling economic and political clout of Hispanics, view rising immigration negatively. In the Pew survey, 53% of those dubbed 'Disadvantaged Democrats' call increasing immigration a threat to 'traditional American customs and values.'
As the party in power, Republicans may have the most to lose from an immigration debate. Mr. Bush, whose experience as Texas governor made him intimately familiar with the current system's problems, has called for overhaul in general terms similar to the principles underlying the McCain-Kennedy bill. But with the White House preoccupied with Mr. Bolton's nomination as United Nations ambassador, a showdown with Democrats over the president's judicial nominees and Social Security overhaul, immigration hasn't made it to the top of the administration's priority list.
Mr. McCain has his own agenda, as a potential 2008 presidential candidate with a reputation for bucking traditional partisan alignments. By teaming with Mr. Kennedy -- who four years ago helped Mr. Bush push his No Child Left Behind education initiative through Congress -- the maverick Republican demonstrated the possibility of mustering a majority in the Senate.
The more polarized and disciplined House isn't as kind to mavericks. But Mr. McCain hopes to overcome conservative resistance there with the same sort of public advocacy that produced his 2002 triumph on campaign-finance overhaul.
Among the tools he can brandish: a recent Tarrance Group poll, conducted for the National Immigration Forum, a Washington organization that embraces immigration as an American tradition. The Republican polling firm found that Americans across party, regional and demographic lines back changes like the ones in the McCain-Kennedy bill. In case wavering lawmakers are skeptical, the survey also concludes that 'most voters do not base their support for political candidates on the immigration issue.'