In its announced clampdown on companies that hire illegal workers, the federal government has arrested nearly four times as many people in the past year as it did two years ago, but only a tiny fraction of those arrests involved criminal charges against those who hired the workers, according to a year-end tally prepared by the Department of Homeland Security.
Fewer than 100 owners, supervisors or hiring officials were arrested in fiscal 2007, compared with nearly 4,900 arrests that involved illegal workers, providers of fake documents and others, the figures show. Immigration experts say the data illustrate the Bush administration's limited success at delivering on its rhetoric about stopping illegal hiring by corporate employers.
"I know what it takes to get a criminal case," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a former state prosecutor and member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. ". . . Why is it that hundreds of bar owners can be sanctioned in Missouri every year for letting somebody with a fake ID have a beer, but we can't manage to sanction hundreds of employers for letting people use fake identities to obtain a job?"
Democratic political consultants have advised the party's lawmakers -- who already are on the defensive about immigration policy -- that the Bush administration's failure to more aggressively target powerful corporations may be a vulnerability for Republican candidates who are seeking to make immigration a campaign issue.
Bush administration officials have promised to strike at the "magnet" of jobs luring illegal immigrants into the country, a goal supported by experts across the political spectrum. "The days of treating employers who violate these laws by giving them the equivalent of a corporate parking ticket -- those days are gone. It's now felonies, jail time, fines and forfeitures," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said at a Nov. 6 news conference.
In a year-end review this month, Chertoff added that the enforcement crackdown will "make a down payment on credibility with the American people." He said Americans' "profound public skepticism" about government efforts to control illegal immigration helped kill a broad, White House-backed overhaul in the Senate this summer.
But even though DHS has ratcheted up its enforcement effort, this year's 92 criminal arrests of employers still amount to a drop in the bucket of a national economy that includes 6 million companies that employ more than 7 million unauthorized workers, several analysts said. Only 17 firms faced criminal fines or other forfeitures this year.
In one case, Richard M. Rosenbaum, the former president of Rosenbaum-Cunningham International, a nationwide cleaning contractor based in Florida, pleaded guilty in October to harboring illegal immigrants and conspiracy to defraud the government, agreeing to pay more than $17 million in restitution and forfeitures.
For decades, political opposition by the businesses that rely on such workers and by the communities where they are employed has helped water down the laws and other tools needed for a more sustained, less scattershot effort.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) "has gotten the message that employer enforcement is essential. . . . Nonetheless, the numbers show the chronic failure of employer enforcement under current laws," said Doris Meissner, commissioner of the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 through 2000 and now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, which studies migration patterns.
"The whole point of employer sanctions is to punish those who provide jobs -- the primary incentive -- to illegal workers. That goal continues to be largely unmet," Meissner said.
Late in the Clinton administration and early in the current administration, the number of illegal immigrants arrested in work-site cases fell -- from 2,849 in 1999 to a low of 445 in 2003 -- although there has since been a rebound. The number of criminal cases brought against employers during that period fell from 182 to four.
ICE reported that the 92 criminal arrests made in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 included 59 owners and 33 corporate officials, human resources workers, crew chiefs and others in the "supervisory chain."
Of the remaining 771 criminal arrests, nearly 90 percent involved workers and other people accused of identity theft or document fraud, money laundering, providing transportation or documentation to illegal workers, or other crimes. Criminal fines and other penalties grew from $600,000 in 2003 to more than $30 million in 2007, but they were dominated by a few large payments, including Rosenbaum's.
ICE Director Julie Myers, who served as chief of staff to Chertoff when he led the Justice Department's criminal division from 2001 to 2003, wrote in response to McCaskill's criticism that it takes time to build criminal cases, and that DHS's tougher criminal enforcement approach is "fundamentally different" from the weak administrative fines and pinprick raids that resulted from a congressional backlash against actions against corporations in the late 1990s.
In an interview, agency spokesman Brandon Alvarez-Montgomery said ICE focuses on "egregious" violators whose business models rely on hiring illegal immigrants, especially those whose practices may promote fraud or border breaches.
McCaskill called such arguments an excuse for not punishing big-money business and farm interests that want cheap labor, effectively penalizing law-abiding business owners and exploiting illegal immigrant workers. "The reality simply doesn't match their rhetoric," said McCaskill, who began pressing ICE to release the employer statistics in September.
In a bluntly worded memo last week, a consortium known as Democracy Corps, organized by Democratic Party consultants Stan Greenberg, Al Quinlan and James Carville, warned Democratic incumbents, candidates in House and Senate battleground districts, and presidential hopefuls that they "ignore the [immigration] issue at their peril."
"If leaders do not show their own frustration with the problem, they will not be heard on this issue -- and many others," they wrote. "There is particular appeal for cracking down on unscrupulous corporations that exploit illegal and legal workers. Voters are eager to believe that companies' preferences for cheap labor are a source of the problem."
The Bush administration has said it is trying to improve its Internet-based E-Verify program, through which less than 1 percent of U.S. employers now voluntarily check new hires' Social Security numbers. It is also fighting major business, farm and labor groups in federal court to use Social Security data generated when suspect numbers are submitted to the government as a sweeping nationwide enforcement tool.
A federal judge blocked the program from going forward in October, but the government is appealing. The administration is also attempting to modify its plan to mail "no-match" letters to 140,000 employers to meet conditions set by the judge.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks to restrict immigration and has opposed the Bush administration's proposals for giving legal status to some illegal immigrants, said the importance of a sustained crackdown involving both raids and the "no-match" program "is to change businesses' expectations, in order to change their behavior."
"Past enforcement actions have been regarded by business correctly as a passing thing. . . . They need to believe it's not just going to go away in a couple of months," Krikorian said. Illegal immigrant labor laws should be enforced as rigorously as child labor laws, he said.
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Comment: Amerika still does not get it as it is blinded by its racist nationalism. There is no is still no humane immigration legislation being proposed that is sane, realistic and compassionate. In fact, the U.S.A. government and its leadres are utterly insane in its cruel and brutal governmental policy in relation to immigrants and in denial of key aspects of connected reality in relation to the millions of so-called illegal immigrants already inside the continental United States. ~Peta
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Come Together and Create!
Peter S. Lopez ~aka:Peta
Sacramento, California, Aztlan
Email: sacranative@yahoo.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NetworkAztlan_News/
http://www.networkaztlan.com/
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