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Friday, August 10, 2007
| The
Bush administration today announced
a new package of harsh immigration
measures that it intends to implement unilaterally, without
action by Congress. As always with immigration-related proposals,
the devil is in the details, and we have yet to see the details of much
of this package. But the summary description that has been
released is disturbing in the extreme.
Instead of fixing our broken immigration system, the new plan embraces
the bumper-sticker enforcement-only philosophy of immigration reform
opponents. Its adoption will harm our economy, increase
discrimination, and in general make our nation a more hostile place to
live for all.
Among its most significant measures, the new administration plan would:
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Ramp up
militarization of the border.
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Expand detention
facilities with no suggestion that widespread rights violations in
the current facilities will be reviewed.
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Reduce access to
court hearings to contest erroneous deportation orders.
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Convert Social
Security Administration (SSA) "no-match" letters into an immigration
enforcement tool.
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Rename the flawed
Basic Pilot electronic employment eligibility verification program
and make it mandatory for all federal contractors and vendors.
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Endeavor to
incorporate state departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) data into the
Basic Pilot program.
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Increase civil
fines against employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers and
expand efforts to criminally prosecute employers.
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"Streamline" guest
worker programs with no indication that the current abuses of those
programs will be addressed.
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Mandate a study of
how to deny lawful residents and U.S. citizens credit for Social
Security contributions they made before obtaining legal status.
These measures are an apparent effort to appease the forces of fear and
hatred that have entered the mainstream in the most recent round of the
immigration debate. In the course of that debate, President Bush
and his spokespeople have repeatedly reiterated their belief that
immigration enforcement alone cannot solve our immigration problems so
long as the status of millions of undocumented immigrants and the future
flow needs of the nation remain unresolved. That basic truth has
not changed, but the administration nevertheless now appears poised to
move forward with this new get-tough and solve-nothing agenda.
Thanks to the
Rights Working Group for allowing us to make liberal use
of their work for the summary that follows.
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Publish the government's final rule on
Social Security "no-match"
letters.
The new rule, which will likely
be published on Monday and take effect in 30 days, will apply to
situations where an employer receives a letter indicating that an
employee's Social Security number does not match government records.
Basing worksite enforcement on a federal database that is
notoriously unreliable poses a great danger to workers. If an
employer cannot resolve the discrepancy between the worker's
documents and the government's records, this rule will encourage
employers to fire the worker. Without comprehensive
immigration reform, this no-match rule is likely to cause massive
layoffs of authorized as well as unauthorized workers and to drive
the undocumented population further into the shadows. It also
raises concerns about discrimination, given that the Social Security
records of employment-authorized immigrants and naturalized citizens
are many times more likely to contain a mismatch than are those of
persons born in the U.S. The rule will encourage unscrupulous
employers to pay their workers under the table to avoid risk of
prosecution based on a no-match finding.
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Deny a fair day in court.
Immigrants who have a
valid claim to stay in the U.S. should be permitted to see a judge
and shouldn't be forced to leave the U.S. simply because they
previously agreed to voluntarily depart on their own. Today,
the administration announced its intention to create a new
regulation that would limit an immigrant's access to a hearing if
the person previously accepted a form of immigration relief called
"voluntary departure." Immigrants who have new family
relationships such as a recent marriage to a U.S. citizen should be
able to ask a judge for relief in their case. By announcing
this new regulation, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seems
intent on doing an end run around several federal court decisions
that permit immigrants to have a hearing even though they previously
accepted voluntary departure.
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Rename and expand the Basic Pilot
employment eligibility verification program.
The administration announced that
it will "re-brand" the Basic Pilot program, which currently is
mostly voluntary, and will expand the program more than 10-fold by
mandating its use by more than 200,000 federal contractors and
vendors. The program
will now be called "E-Verify"
instead of Basic Pilot, but changing its name will do nothing to
address the
serious flaws that have been
well-documented even in its current small and voluntary
state. Those problems include rampantly inaccurate
information, significant privacy lapses, and employer abuse of the
program. The information inaccuracies frequently lead new
employees to delay their start dates or to lose their jobs
altogether. The administration will also seek to expand the
data sources used by the Basic Pilot to include passport and visa
information. This not only raises privacy issues but also
concerns about the likelihood of more inaccurate information in the
databases. Finally, the administration plans to reduce the
number of documents that can be used to verifity employment
eligibility, a change that will prevent many work-authorized
individuals from proving their status.
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Encourage states to make the
Basic Pilot/E-Verify mandatory.
The administration plans to
conduct outreach and provide technical assistance to states to help
them require all businesses to use the Basic Pilot. Based on
the recent
decision by a federal court
judge in the Hazelton litigation, such a state or local
requirement would be preempted by federal law.
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Expand information-sharing
between DHS, SSA, and state DMVs.
The new data sources used in the
Basic Pilot will include visas and passport information as well as
photos and data from state motor vehicle departments. It is
unclear what, if any other sources would be tapped in the increased
collection of data that will be widely available to the expanding
number of program participants. Such sharing of information
between inaccurate DHS databases and SSA raises concerns both about
privacy and the potential for proliferation of inaccurate
information.
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Increase militarization of the
border and the interior.
The plan would add 18,300 Border
Patrol agents; 370 miles of fencing; 300 miles of
vehicle barriers; and 105 camera and radar towers.
The strategy also includes plans to increase "fugitive operation
teams," which will lead to more raids in our communities and on
immigrants' homes. The announcement of these increases comes
during one of the deadliest summers on record at the border,
including the shooting death by Border Patrol agents of a
23-year-old immigrant last Wednesday.
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Add detention bed space without
addressing current abuses.
The proposal would expand
detention capacity from current levels of approximately 27,500
detention beds to 31,500 detention beds. There is no
suggestion that there will be an effort to cure the widespread
abuses in the current detention system that have been documented in
recent months, including imprisonment of children, lack of decent
medical care, lack of access to telephones, attorneys, legal
materials, and other basic rights violations (see "Injunction Upheld: Judge Finds Widespread
Abuses in Immigrant Detention Troubling Evidence That Asylum
Seekers' Rights Are Not Respected").
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Continue efforts at state and
local law enforcement of immigration law.
The administration announced
plans to continue its "287(g)" program, which allows states and
localities to enter into agreements with the federal government to
enforce immigration law. It also announced related taskforces
that will expand local enforcement of immigration law, putting more
communities in danger. Many communities and local police
departments oppose this policy because it interferes with community
policing projects that encourage immigrant community members to
report crimes.
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Expand the list of "gangs" that
the State Department will use to deny visas to foreign nationals.
The announcement is
not clear about what criteria or process will be used to determine
what constitutes a "gang."
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Expand efforts to repatriate to
"recalcitrant" countries.
The administration is seeking to
expand a repatriation system, which has been widely criticized by
foreign governments and advocates within the U.S. for its failure to
ensure detainees' safety and the safety of local communities.
The administration should improve repatriation assistance so that
deportees are transitioned safely into their new communities.
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Increase penalties and criminal
prosecution for employers that knowingly hire unauthorized workers.
In this new
enforcement scheme there is no contemplated increase in criminal or
civil enforcement of labor laws, which could actually benefit
workers who are employed by exploitative businesses and which also
would reduce the economic windfall that accrues to bad-apple
employers when they hire and exploit undocumented workers.
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Study the Social Security system
to deny credit for contributions made before obtaining legal status.
Undocumented
immigrants are already ineligible for Social Security benefits.
By ordering such a study, the administration appears to be signaling
support for taking away the Social Security credits that lawfully
residing immigrants and naturalized citizens earned before obtaining
such status. In addition, the administration will require all
relevant agencies to report to the president a detailed plan for how
they will share data to eliminate the "problem" of workers getting
credit for such contributions, raising serious privacy and civil
liberties concerns.
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"Streamline" existing guest
worker programs.
The administration plans to
"streamline" several existing guest worker programs, including the
H-2A agricultural worker program, the H-2B program for
nonagricultural workers, and skilled worker categories. With
respect to the H-2B program, which has been
plagued by abuses that sometimes
rise to the level of slavery and trafficking, the plan
would move from a government-certified system to an
employer-attestation system, allowing abusive and nonabusive
employers alike to "attest" that they are complying with all
requirements and not displacing U.S. workers.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT
Josh Bernstein, director
of federal policy | 202.216.0261 x. 2
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