San Diego Union-Tribune - An Immigration Court Case to Watch

Op-Ed

San Diego Union-Tribune - An Immigration Court Case to Watch

By Darrell Issa
October 31, 2007

To surprisingly little fanfare, this fall the Justice Department filed suit against the state of Illinois for enacting a law that would prevent businesses from acting to comply with United States immigration laws. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagovich, earlier this year, signed legislation prohibiting employers in his state from voluntarily participating in a federal program that allows them to check whether or not a prospective employee is legally in the United States and eligible for employment.

At stake in this court case is a potentially landmark decision about the federal government's ability to enforce our immigration laws. This decision will become even more important now that a federal district court here in California has decided to block the administration's efforts to implement a similar enforcement strategy of sending no-match letters when an employee's Social Security number does not match the name on record. According to the judge who made this highly dubious ruling, businesses "will be irreparably harmed if (the Department of Homeland Security) is permitted to enforce the new rule."

If this wrongheaded judge has his way, the United States has truly become the land of opportunity for those who break our laws. Moreover, if states are free to produce laws in contradiction with federal immigration law, then there is nothing preventing them from passing laws that conflict with federal tax or health care policy, for example.

In Illinois , Gov. Blagovich claimed that the error rate within the current employment verification system for prospective employees is too high, thereby harming legal applicants who are flagged, and he used that claim to block immigration enforcement. The fact of the matter is that there is a very fast appeals process in the verification system, and employers are specifically prohibited from taking adverse employment action against prospective employees until a final status determination is made. Further, 92 percent of the time employees are cleared and authorized to work immediately.

In the case where the system reports a discrepancy between a Social Security number and personal information, this is a red flag that Social Security Administration records may be incorrect or that a prospective employee may be using a stolen identity. With identity theft rampant, American citizens should want this problem brought to their attention and corrected immediately.

The number one attractor of illegal aliens to the United States is the availability of jobs where documentation is not required. Integral to our efforts to stem the flow of illegal immigrants to the United States is making such jobs more difficult to obtain while creating sensible programs to allow employers access to needed labor through the administration of temporary legal worker programs. The Illinois' law clearly violates the United States Constitution by usurping federal authority, and I applaud the decision to take the state of Illinois to court for actively undermining our immigration enforcement efforts.

Over 23,000 companies, many federal agencies and members of Congress are already participating in the employee verification program. Instead of dragging its heels, the business community at-large should embrace the voluntary use of this program as a way to identify possible shortcomings before use of the program becomes a national mandate. The business community must recognize that using illegal labor is unacceptable, and businesses can either voluntarily help police themselves or the government will continue to step in with its own more burdensome solutions.

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