By Catherine Leonard, BLR HR Editor
Just my E-pinion
There’s been great controversy over the scheme to use Social Security’s No-Match Letter process to help the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) force the firing of illegal immigrant workers. The scheme is on hold for now, but not the controversy. Here’s one BLR editor’s e-pinion. What’s yours?
I don’t always agree with AFL-CIO or the American Civil Liberties Union, but they and some other groups took a step recently that I applaud.
They sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over its new rule forcing employers to fire workers who can’t promptly straighten out foul-ups in the documentation of their right to work in the U.S. They claim there are so many inaccuracies in Social Security’s data that the jobs of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens will be threatened.
The jobs of legal immigrants and citizens are not all that’s at risk. What about all the Social Security and other taxes paid by the estimated 8 million workers here illegally? What’s the federal government going to do without those billions of dollars? And what will employers do without all those workers who pick vegetables, wash dishes, clean hotel rooms, build new roofs … and countless other jobs?
I read one commentator’s recommendation that if employers would just raise wages for the work often done by illegal aliens, out-of-work U.S. citizens would flock to take those jobs. But unless employers also raise prices for produce, hotel rooms, restaurant meals, and other offerings, they can’t possibly afford to raise wages. Will the public be overjoyed that we’ve sent home all those illegal workers, but supermarket, construction, and a lot of other prices have skyrocketed? Is that a tradeoff that people want? I doubt it.
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Seems to me that there are many other problems with this new bureaucratic scheme to “Save American jobs for Americans.”
Social Security wasn’t supposed to share information on no-match letters with DHS. So if DHS wanted to raid an employer, it needed its own sources of suspicious information. But an immigration specialist tells me that, with the big rush to get those letters in the mail and employers still uninformed about the new rule, guess who’s going to collaborate?
Social Security will put the letters in the envelopes and send the envelopes to DHS, which will stuff them with compliance instructions! Who wants to bet that DHS won’t record all the employer names and addresses for prompt follow-up after 90 days? Not me! I have a vision of what’s going to happen to all those employees who have the misfortune to be named Miguel Gomez. I hear that’s as common a name for Latinos as John Jones is for Anglos. If there’s just one person out there named Miguel Gomez with a criminal record, all the others are likely to be in serious trouble with their documents.
All in all, I think the new rule, which puts the responsibility for immigration on employers’ shoulders without government reform, is going to be a disaster—for workers, for employers, and for the U.S. in general.
What do you think? Did you get some no-match letters in 2005 that still haven’t been cleared up? Are you about to lose some good and faithful workers?
good for you for telling it like it is. I work in construction and we are going to have to raise our prices and if the owners don’t raise the prices they pay us, we won’t be able to employ anyone!
I completely agree with everything you said! I have worked as management in the hospitality and construction industries and you are so right about how this type of law would cripple these industries as well as the economy overall. My question for the DHS would be, why make employers fire people who are gainfully employed? They are not the problem. From my experience, most of the people in these industries aren’t legal, but they work long hard hours and are among the best employees. So how are they a “threat” to national security? If they force undocumented workers out of work, do they really think they (the illegal immigrants) will just go back to there home country and stay there? No! Next time, they will come back and take jobs “below the radar” to avoid detection. And these are the type of work situations that usually begat abuses (unfair pay & labor practices). It saddens me that our government officials are behaving this way…America was founded as a country of immigrants. Isn’t that what we’re is all about? That anyone from anywhere can come here and enjoy a better life??
While what you say may be true, you forget the other side of the story and the cost of illegal’s to the states and the nation. In a recent study that said “Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household,” said Steven A. Camarota, author of the study. The cost is only higher today. In addition over 30% of our prision population are Illegal aliens. Seems to me that if we do it right, follow the rule of law that we all will benefit.
This a complex issue and employers should not be made to shoulder all the burden but the fact is one of the reasons the numbers are the way they are is that the Illegal aliens are lower educated, under skilled and willing to work for a lower wage. If employers were paying them the actual cost of labor many of the numbers above would go away. Have you looked at your health insurance bill lately? Why do you think medical expences are going up so much. In California there is an ad on TV for universial health care being promoted by the community doctors which says that they are asorbing 80 billion dollars of medical cost a year – I wonder how much of that expense comes from the illegal population and is a result of employeers that don’t want to bear the cost of benefits for their employees? Or how many employers are hiring people on a part time bases so that they don’t have to pay benefits? Let’s be real maybe we need the workforce but don’t you think that we can increase the number of legal aliens, that are better educated and have a better chance of achieving the American Dream?
As for the Social Security Mis-Match letters all the ones I’ve seen have been been because the numbers don’t match, it’s always amazing to me how may don’t resolve the problem but leave for another position.
What planet were you born on? The first thing enforcing “no matches” will do is get rid of the illegal aliens. The key word here is ILLEGAL. You sort that mess out of the process, a lot of things will clean themselves up. The only reaons costs will rise when you get rid of the llegal workers because the company’s who hire them won’t cut their profit margin. Do you REALLY think those “savings” are passed on to the consumer? Open your eyes. The people who employ them pocket the savings. Any job taken away from an undocumented or illegal worker is a job that a struggling college student can have to pay for their education.