Posted on 12/18/2005 6:01:15 PM PST by SwinneySwitch
Change in work site enforcement policies means heavier penalties for violators
December 18, 2005 — For three decades, Victor Bocanegra has run GIRO Landscaping & Construction, offering services that include general lawn and garden care and building retainer walls for waterfront properties just about anywhere in the Rio Grande Valley.
It’s hard work and requires skilled laborers. It doesn’t always require proof of citizenship, Bocanegra suggested.
The San Benito resident admits he’s employed undocumented immigrants and says they’re paid the same as legal workers, above minimum wage.
And, in his 33 years in the lawn and garden business, he’s only been questioned by the government once.
“It’s not very common for them to go and check on the job site. You hardly see them,” said Bocanegra, who semi-retired last year.
Bocanegra’s argument is not unique.
“There are a lot of jobs that only the illegals do,” he said.
U.S. work site enforcement policies are meant to keep illegal workers from U.S. jobs.
Since 2002, work site enforcement — investigating an employer’s and his employee’s legal authorization to work in the country — has been under the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.
Before then, work site enforcement was a practice of Immigration and Naturalization Services.
The handoff means a change in enforcement tactics, ICE spokeswoman Jaime Zuieback said, warning that employers should be aware that the switch would be from emphasizing fines to jail time.
“Fines were not a deterrent,” Zuieback said. “Companies really looked at them as a cost of doing business.”
Also, investigations have increasingly focused on what ICE calls “critical infrastructure facilities,” such as airports, seaports, nuclear and chemical plants and defense facilities, she said.
Operations like Bocanegra’s could go largely ignored as small potatoes in a larger pot.
“We’re placing our priority on illegal workers who have gained access to critical infrastructure work sites,” she said.
Despite suspected cases numbering in the millions, ICE churned out only 46 criminal convictions of employers for unauthorized alien investigations in 2004. In 2003 this number was 72, and according to ICE’s available statistics, since 1993, it never surpassed the 2003 high.
“That’s a staffing issue, and that’s a budget issue. They don’t have enough officials to adequately enforce it,” Colby Bower, policy coordinator for the Border Trade Alliance (BTA), said of work site enforcement by ICE.
The BTA is an organization including border cities and counties (such as Cameron) and private companies that promote trade.
“The government doesn’t want to be seen as the Big Brother crashing down on the doors of business because it hurts the economy,” Colby said.
“They know the bind the employers are in; they are aware of it,” he said, referring to the economics of competing amongst companies that employ undocumented workers.
Laws governing work site enforcement have no teeth by design, said Allan Wernick, an immigration lawyer, columnist and professor at Baruch College in New York.
“When Congress wrote the law, they wanted to make it such that it would be hard for employers to get caught,” Wernick said. “That’s the reason you don’t have very many convictions — there is not a huge amount of enforcement going on.”
Wernick cited the large number of undocumented immigrants, together with the relatively small number of agents to enforce the law as the main reason there are millions of undocumented workers in the country and only dozens of convictions.
The Pew Hispanic Center, a nonprofit research center, counted the undocumented population in the U.S. at 11 million, including more than 6 million Mexican nationals, as of March 2005.
“We prioritize our workload on a daily basis,” Zuieback said. “If we have a power plant in a community and we think there are illegal aliens there who could be vulnerable to exploitation by criminals or terrorists, that is going to be a very high priority.”
Zuieback said that, while no case is “off-limits,” ICE focuses on sites that pose the greatest threat to public safety, again citing critical infrastructure facilities.
The cases against employers can be difficult to make, she said, and can be very complex. Cases are initiated via tips from the public, in the course of other investigations and proactive sting operations, she said. ICE also works closely with the Border Patrol to initiate cases.
Once cases are investigated, prosecuted and convictions are meted-out, the penalties for employers are applied, which can include fines and prison time.
After these cases are made, the maximum civil penalty for a federal I-9 form violation is $1,100 per person, $11,000 for knowingly hiring an undocumented immigrant. I-9 forms are used by employers to determine the eligibility of potential employees to work in the United States.
Criminal penalties range from up to $3,000 per person hired and up to five years in prison.
But, obtaining maximum penalties isn’t easy.
“It’s not impossible for them to investigate or find a pattern of practice, but it’s not very easy,” said Wernick, an immigration lawyer. The standards to establish a pattern of practice are very high, he said, making the applicability of the penalties difficult.
“A simple one-time violation is not going to lead to a criminal conviction; there may not be a penalty at all,” Wernick said.
“You have to show that employer knowingly hired the workers. That’s a pretty high standard.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s three-tiered strategy to improve national security by returning all undocumented immigrants, reforming immigration laws and strengthening the border is key to ICE’s work site enforcement, Zuieback said.
“It’s an integral part of our mission, and it is an integral component of what we do in terms of both public safety and national security,” she said.
Wernick said border enforcement would be more important than work site enforcement, in the case that the government really wanted to assuage illegal immigration.
“If you are going to stop people from coming, you are going to have to do that at the border. In the interior, that is going to be very difficult.”
The government’s lax enforcement in non-critical infrastructure facilities may be partly due to economics, said Colby, of the Border Trade Alliance.
A labor shortage will be growing in the next 20 years, he said, leading to “massive” labor shortages, and pointing to the need for a broad immigration reform which includes a guest worker program.
This is particularly of concern since Mexico, the largest supplier of undocumented workers, is going to run out of workers to send to the U.S., and this will begin to be apparent in 15 years, said Ricardo Guerra Carrillo, the adjunct general director of the Institute for Mexicans in the Exterior (IME) in Mexico City.
Mexico’s National Population Council reported 400,000 Mexicans leave the country every year, the vast majority coming to the United States. However, Mexico’s population will get older and run out of working-age men and women to send abroad, Guerra added.
But immigration — both legal and illegal — is a “huge” component of the economy now and will be in the future, said Sylvia Allegretto, an economist from the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank.
“It is important now,” Allegretto said, “and immigration will continue to play an important role in filling up jobs here in the U.S.”
sicalderon@brownsvilleherald.com
Nationwide Convictions for Employing People Unauthorized to Work in the U.S. 1993-2004
These statistics reflect convictions for employers of unauthorized aliens, including criminal, administrative and auxiliary investigations. Before 2002 the enforcement fell under Immigration and Naturalization Services, after this time the responsibility was handed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under the Department of Homeland Security.
1993 40
1994 11
1995 52
1996 48
1997 48
1998 48
1999 24
2000 49
2001 19
2002 25
2003 72
2004 46
*Source: Department of Homeland Security Yearbook of Immigration Statistics
Nationwide Border Patrol Apprehensions
These statistics reflect the nationwide apprehensions by the Border Patrol, for both the northern and southern border, including all nationalities.
2000 1,676,438
2001 1,266,213
2002 955,310
2003 931,557
2004 1,160,395
2005 1,188,977
*Source: Border Patrol
Penalties for Employers Convicted of Hiring Unauthorized Persons
This is the range of penalties that employers who are convicted of knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants may face.
Civil Cases
*I-9, employment eligibility verification, violation: $110 — $1,100 per person hired
*Knowingly hiring or continuing to employ illegal aliens: $275 — $11,000 per person hired
Criminal Cases
*Engaging in a pattern of practice of knowing hiring or continuing to employ illegal aliens: up to $3,000 per person hired and imprisonment of up to 6 months
*Knowingly hiring 10 or more illegal aliens in a 12 month period with actual knowledge of unauthorized status: up to 5 years
*Source: Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Amen to that! As owners of a small business, my husband and I have had able-bodied people quit for no good reason except pure trifling-ness (is that a word?) and within days we got paperwork from the Department of Social Services to fill out relating to their applications for food stamps and welfare. It makes me furious! Our tax money is paying them to sit on their rear ends and draw "entitlement" (oh, how I despise that term!) benefits and they do nothing more to be entitled to these things than breathe.
Btw, we now do background checks on all our job applicants, including SS# checks.
Our ethos as a nation has been gutted and destroyed by lack of need and too much want.
Instead of working in malls, young malls should be doing physical labor, not working the counter at Starbucks.
As a compensation yes. But not as a incentive to blow the whistle. What about quick deportation PLUS some nice instant bonus (refund of which employer will be liable later)?
It means chief or boss.
In the early days of SS, several people used SS# 000-00-0000, because it came in their wallet!
She also said she was a former slave during the Ohio 2004 recount.
Thank GW and the RINOs - more illegals in the past 5 years then in any other time in history. They know the answer is simple but instead fool Americans into believing it cant be done.
All through the article, this DHS/ICE lackey is attempting to justify why the invasion should continue.
Pres. Bush is great on the WOT. He's our worst enemy on the war on our borders. And he's far from alone, the OBL boat is filled to bursting.
"Good Lord above, how do these alleged writers and editors stay employed?"
It's The Brownsville Herald, not The Houston Chronic-lier, Xenalyte.
Thanks for the info....unfortunatly I was hospitalized and did not recieve it till after I got out and the job was done. I did meet the crew, subcontracted by the big shot contractor. Amazingly enough the whole 6 man crew were gringo's.........and here in Arizona that is unusual even here in kingman these days. All young hearty guys except for the middle-aged guy with the clipboard keeping them moving. And they worked like blind mine donkeys till the job was done....and done very well I might add....according to my neighbor who oversaw it all for me.
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