Who Left the Door Open?

Sunday, Sep. 12, 2004 By DONALD L. BARLETT ANDJAMES B. STEELE

BLIND EYE: The Border Patrol installed portable guard booths called cyclopes, but it doesn�t have enough agents to man them

VINCENT J. MUSI / AURORA FOR TIME

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How Corporate America Thrives on Illegals
Popular belief has it that illegals are crossing the border in search of work. In fact, many have their jobs lined up before they leave Mexico. That's because corporate managers go so far as to place orders with smugglers for a specific number of able bodies to be delivered. For corporate America, employing illegal aliens at wages so low few citizens could afford to take the jobs is great for profits and stockholders. That's why the payrolls of so many businesses—meat-packers, poultry processors, landscape firms, construction companies, office-cleaning firms and corner convenience stores, among others—are jammed with illegals. And companies are rarely, if ever, punished for it.

A single statistic attests to this. In 2002 the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) issued orders levying fines on only 13 employers for hiring illegal aliens, a minuscule portion of the thousands of offenders. Nonenforcement of employer sanctions, which is in keeping with the Federal Government's nonenforcement of immigration laws across the board, has been the equivalent of hanging out a help wanted sign for illegals. Says Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank on immigration issues: "They're telling people, 'If you can run that border, we have a job for you. You can get a driver's license.

You can get a job. You'll be able to send money home.' And in that context, you'd be stupid not to try. We say, 'If you run the gauntlet, you're in.' That's the incentive they've created."

For nearly 20 years, it has been a crime to hire illegal aliens. Amid an earlier surge in illegal immigration, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided that employers could be fined up to $10,000 for every illegal alien they hired, and repeat offenders could be sent to jail. The act was a response to the widespread belief that employer sanctions were the only way to stem the tide. "We need employer sanctions to reduce the attraction of jobs in the U.S.," an INS spokesman declared as Congress debated the bill. When President Ronald Reagan signed it, he called the sanctions the "keystone" of the law. "It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here," he said. Making it a crime for a company to hire an illegal was seen as such a dramatic step at the time that many worried over the consequences. Phil Gramm, then a Republican Senator from Texas, said the legislation "holds out great peril, peril that employers dealing in good faith could be subject to criminal penalties and in fact go to jail for making a mistake in hiring an illegal alien."

But companies had little to fear. Neither Reagan nor subsequent Presidents or Congresses were eager to enforce the law. The fate of just one provision in the 1986 act is revealing. As part of the enforcement effort, the law called for a pilot program to establish a telephone-verification system that employers could use when hiring workers. It would allow employers to tap into a national data bank to determine the legal status of a job applicant. Only those who had legitimate documentation would be approved. With such a system, employers could no longer use the excuse that they had no way to verify a potential worker's legal status.

To this day—18 years after passage of the immigration-reform bill—a nationwide telephone-verification system has yet to be implemented. A small-scale verification project was established in 1992, but it covered only nine employers in five states. In 1996, Congress enacted yet another immigration-reform bill, and it too provided for a telephone-verification program. Called Basic Pilot, it promised to provide employers with an easy way to verify a prospective employee's status. An employer who signed up for the system could call an 800 number and provide the name, Social Security number or the alien ID number of a new hire. The employer would receive either a confirmation that the number and name were valid or an indication that called for further checking.

The system is fatally flawed. Basic Pilot is voluntary. Employers aren't required to sign up. Imagine what compliance with tax laws would be if filing a 1040 were optional.

For all the rhetoric about the perils of illegal immigration, Congress shows no interest in cracking down on employers. When the INS attempted in the past to enforce the law, lawmakers slapped down the agency. In 1998 the INS launched Operation Vanguard, a bold attempt to catch illegals in Nebraska's meat-packing industry. Rather than raid individual plants to round up undocumented workers, as it had done for years, the INS aimed Operation Vanguard at the heart of illicit hiring practices. The agency subpoenaed the employment records of packing houses, then sought to match employee numbers with other data like Social Security numbers.

The INS subpoenaed some 24,000 hiring records and identified 4,700 people with discrepancies at 40 processing plants. It then called for further documentation to verify the workers' status. Nebraska was seen as just the first step. Plans were in the works to launch similar probes in other states where large numbers of illegals were known to be employed in the meat-packing industry. But the INS never got the chance. A huge outcry in Nebraska from meat-packers, Hispanic groups, farmers, community organizations, local politicians and the state's congressional delegation forced the INS to back off.

Not surprisingly, the INS's employer-sanctions program has all but disappeared. Investigations targeting employers of illegal aliens dropped more than 70%, from 7,053 in 1992 to 2,061 in 2002. Arrests on job sites declined from 8,027 in 1992 to 451 in 2002. Perhaps the most dramatic decline: the final orders levying fines for immigration-law violations plunged 99%, from 1,063 in 1992 to 13 in 2002.

As might be expected, employers got the message, albeit one quite different from that spelled out in the 1986 and '96 legislation. Now many corporate managers feel emboldened to place orders for workers while the prospective employees are still in Mexico, then assist them in obtaining phony documentation and transport them hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles from the interior of Mexico to a production line in an American factory.

This notion was supported by evidence introduced during an alien-smuggling trial in 2003 involving Tyson Foods Inc., which describes itself as "the world's largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef and pork." In this secretly recorded conversation, a federal undercover agent posed as an alien smuggler who was taking an order from the manager of a chicken-processing plant in Monroe, N.C.: FEDERAL AGENT: [After explaining that he was a friend of a mutual friend] He said you wanted to talk to me?

CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: Yeah, about help ... Now I'm going to need quite a few ... Starting on the 29th, a Monday, we are going to start. How many can I get, and how often can you do it?

FEDERAL AGENT: Well, it's not a problem. I think [the mutual friend]told me that you wanted 10?

CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: Well, 10 at a time. But over the period of the next three or four months— January, February, March, April, probably May, stuff like that—I'm going to replace somewhere between 300 and 400 people, maybe 500. I'm going to need a lot.

FEDERAL AGENT: ... I can give you what you need.

CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: Now let me ask you this. Do these people have a photo ID and a Social Security card?

FEDERAL AGENT: No ... these people come from Mexico. I pick them up at Del Rio. That's in Texas, after they cross the river, and then we take them over there, and they get their cards. [The mutual friend]gets them their cards, I guess.

CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: I need to talk to him about that.

FEDERAL AGENT: About the cards?

CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: Yes, some of them that's got the INS card, and if they put it in a computer ... if it's not any good ... Something happens, and we have to lay them off. But if they just have got a regular photo ID from anywhere and a Social Security card, then we don't have to do that.