In the last two years, Homeland Security has focused increasingly on work-site enforcement -- raiding factories and prosecuting employers in criminal court. In June, Chertoff said his agency would not slow down.
"We're going to continue to bring criminal cases against employers in record numbers," he warned. "Some of those employers are going to be very unhappy. They're going to say, 'It's unfair.' But in order to regain credibility with the American people that has been squandered over 30 years, we're going to have to be tough."
In 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, the Social Security Administration sent 8.1 million letters to workers at their home addresses, asking them to resolve differences between the information Social Security has on file and what is shown on their employers' W-2 forms. If no home address is available, the letter is sent to the worker's company. The agency sent 1.5 million of these letters in 2005. Officials will also write to a business if it has more than 10 employees who trigger a no-match.
In a December 2006 study to examine the accuracy of Homeland Security's existing program of voluntary employer verification, Social Security's inspector general estimated that 17.8 million records on file had inconsistencies, including those of 12.7 million native-born citizens, 250,000 foreign-born citizens and 4.8 million noncitizens -- a category for legal immigrants.
When businesses ignored the letters in the past, little would happen. The Homeland Security rule is expected to give companies a few weeks to check whether the inconsistency is in their records. If it is not, the companies will have to give workers a few months to resolve the problem with Social Security. If the workers do not, the companies must fire them or face fines. The rule, expected today or early next week, could be enacted immediately or after a period of 30 or 60 days.
Laura Reiff, a co-chair of the Business Immigration & Compliance Group at Greenberg Traurig, a Washington law firm, predicts it will trigger "a massive sea change in how employers deal with no-match letters." Her firm tried unsuccessfully to delay implementation of the rule during recent debate on a Homeland Security spending bill.
"My real fear is that we'll see lots of terminations and a lot of people displaced, maybe some of them going into the underground economy," she said. "Lawfully work-authorized people may also be terminated."
Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, noted the millions of no-match letters that Social Security sends every year and was skeptical about Homeland Security's ability to follow through. "I don't know where they're going to get the workforce to do it," he said.
Immigrants rights groups were also concerned.
"With comprehensive immigration reform failed, this is an attempt to deal with the problem administratively, but doing this without comprehensive reform is just setting up a failed system," said Tyler Moran of the National Immigration Law Center. "This rule will have an enormous impact on the economy, and it's not just undocumented immigrants.
"We're going to see a lot of collateral damage."
--
nicole.gaouette@latimes.com
