Posted on 09/02/2003 5:04:52 PM PDT by holyscroller
Immigration agents have virtually stopped punishing employers of illegal workers. Instead, they are arresting immigrants coming out of jails, packed into smugglers' vans or working at potential terrorist targets.
Nationally, the number of employers fined for hiring illegal workers or failing to verify their paperwork dropped from 808 in 1996 to just 13 last year. No one in Colorado has been fined for hiring illegal workers in three years, although a few employers have been prosecuted criminally.
Raids at work sites to round up workers have nearly vanished. Arrests in such cases in the U.S. have fallen from 17,552 to 451 in the past six years. In Colorado, the only two raids in the past year were at Denver International Airport and the Air Force Academy - both sensitive security locations.
The shift away from enforcement on most employers is the result of security worries, staffing levels and, in the view of Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., political pressure by members of Congress who want to protect companies from raids that can strip their labor force.
Tancredo, who has made immigration his No. 1 issue, said the change in policy is disastrous. He said it has kicked open the door to American jobs for illegals and has drawn so many here to work that terrorists can't be found in the flood."Their numbers swamp us," he said.
Others say illegal immigration won't stop as long as the migrants can find better jobs in the U.S. than at home.
There is no reliable count of illegal immigrants in the United States, but federal government estimates put their number at 7 million. Employers are required to verify work eligibility by inspecting identification documents, although they don't have responsibility to spot forgeries.
An undocumented construction worker who gave his name only as Oscar said everyone knows it's easy to get a job now.
"All you need are fake documents," said Oscar, 27, who's been working in the United States for seven years. Social Security cards and residency cards can be bought for a couple of hundred dollars, he said.
"Some employers don't even ask for your papers," Oscar said. "They just take the Social Security numbers you give them, without anything else."
Immigration officials point out they have a limited number of agents and they are best used where they can have the most impact - on public safety and national security.
"We're focusing on critical infrastructure and egregious violators - employers who hold people in substandard conditions, airports, nuclear power facilities, public utilities, military bases, criminals, alien smuggling, trafficking in persons, money laundering," said Jim Chaparro, who heads immigration investigations in Denver.
"That doesn't preclude us from other (investigations), but that is where we are putting our resources," Chaparro said.
Shift began in late '90s
The move away from raiding and punishing employers started in the late 1990s and accelerated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In 1999, the Immigration and Naturalization Service said that since it could not possibly round up every one of the millions of illegals in the country, it would focus on five areas: criminal aliens, smugglers, fraud, community complaints, and employers who knowingly hired illegal workers or helped bring them into the country. Critics argued that the last target was so restrictive it would let most employers off the hook.Then, half of the INS' 2,000 agents were drafted into the 9-11 investigation, trying to figure out how the hijackers entered the country and how to prevent a repeat.
Immigration officials won't say how many agents left for workplace investigations, citing security. But in the three-state Denver region - Colorado, Wyoming and Utah - there were only five even before 9-11.
From INS to ICE
In March, the INS was split in two. Agents who processed legal immigrants' paperwork went to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Enforcement agents ended up in the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly called ICE. Both were moved to the new Department of Homeland Security.
Locally, ICE agents said arrests of people in the country illegally have soared in the past four years, from 920 to 12,183, in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone. They attribute the increase, in part, to the addition of Quick Response Teams in five cities to pick up smuggled foreigners caught on the highways.
But Washington reports a different set of arrest numbers for this region, higher in some years than the local figures and lower in others. ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok could not account for the difference.
Nationally, arrests of illegals are down because agents say they are concentrating on the worst and more difficult cases.
ICE says it doesn't keep statistics on each of those arrested. First-time illegal immigrants may simply go home under escort and will not be prevented from entering the United States legally later. People caught in the country illegally a second time, however, and criminals and those previously ordered deported are sent to the immigration jail in Aurora, where they are held pending a hearing or deportation.
Just over half the immigrants rounded up in the Denver region last year fell into the criminal category, according to the Denver ICE office.
Warrants for 300,000
Starting about two years ago, agents filed warrants for well over 300,000 illegal immigrants who've escaped deportation orders on the National Crime Information Center database so they can be identified if arrested, Chaparro said. Immigration agents now pick them up from jail and prison and deport them.
"We went through the list and created a Top 10 list on our Web page," Chaparro said. It includes men convicted of rape, murder and assault. "We can't remove all 300,000 this week, so we are focusing on the ones that are the biggest threat to the community," Chaparro said.
For example, the Top 10 list currently includes Jorge Campos-Espinoza of Nicaragua, a convicted rapist depicted with an eyepatch and drooping mustache.
In Colorado, 747 state prison inmates will be kicked out of the country when they finish their sentences, said prison spokeswoman Allison Morgan. But immigration officials are getting varying degrees of cooperation from county jails.
In Mesa County, jailers ask everyone arrested if they are in the country illegally and notify ICE.
Denver does not. It calls ICE only if there is a deportation warrant in the computer. Denver police say they want people to report crime, but they won't if they fear being turned over to ICE.
Enforcement is not just aimed at dangerous criminals, however. One Guatemalan man interviewed last month at the immigration jail said he was in a car when the driver was pulled over for a minor traffic stop in Arapahoe County. All four men in the car were handed over to immigration.
Even legal residents are being deported if they have a felony record.
One young man named Jorge, who arrived in the United States as a baby, was recently deported because he pleaded guilty to selling methamphetamine. He was just a month from becoming a citizen.
The judge in the drug case looked at his otherwise clean record and gave him 90 days in jail. Immigration law allows no such leniency.
"It's my massive screw-up," he said ruefully, the day before he was deported to Mexico, where he has no home.
Teams target smugglers
ICE is also targeting routes used by smugglers.
Five Quick Response Teams around the state were added to take custody of smugglers and their vanloads of people pulled over in traffic stops. In Mesa County alone, 803 people found largely this way have been handed over to immigration officials this year, said Wendy Likes, spokeswoman for the county sheriff.
"Often, the vehicles have broken down due to the weight and stress on the frame," said Capt. Jim Wolfinsbarger of the Colorado State Patrol. He's seen a 4-by-4-inch piece of wood stuck between the frame and the axle, tied on with a rope, in a desperate attempt to keep the vehicle together. Drivers wind up noticeably weaving as they struggle to control the vehicle; patrol officers may think they're pulling over a drunk driver.The only work-force enforcement in Colorado announced by ICE in the past year has been of two potential terrorist targets.
At the Air Force Academy in July, agents indicted 44 landscape, construction and maintenance workers employed by local contractors. ICE spokesman Garrison Courtney said a person mowing the lawn at a military base could be a terrorist doing surveillance in preparation for an attack.
"We're more concerned about a person working as a janitor in a nuclear facility than as a janitor in a restaurant," Courtney said. Asked if that means a restaurant need not worry about being raided, he answered "no," but added that the agency does have priorities.
Airports are also under scrutiny. A hijacker, for instance, could get a security badge simply by working a few weeks as a fast-food cook on a concourse.
In "Operation Tarmac" at the nation's airports, agents audited 3,225 businesses to see if they had documented their employees' eligibility to work - a "significant amount of work-site enforcement," in Chaparro's view.
At DIA last September, more than 100 workers were indicted, most for having fake Social Security cards.
Immigration agents checked all the employers' records. None has been punished.
Placing blame
Even Tancredo, a vociferous critic of U.S. immigration policy, only partly faults immigration officials for giving up on most employer enforcement.
"Congress has to take a great deal of blame on this," he said.
First, Congress made it easy for employers of illegal workers to escape prosecution, he said. To comply with the law employers must only show that they check documents of new hires and keep records.
Then, Tancredo said, immigration officials gave up enforcing the law on employers after members of Congress repeatedly castigated them for stripping businesses of their workers.
In 1998, he said, the INS rounded up illegal workers picking the famously sweet Vidalia onions in Georgia in the midst of the short harvest window.
"Within a week, both U.S. senators from Georgia and three members of the House sent the INS a scathing letter saying, essentially, 'Leave these people alone; they are an important part of our economy,' " Tancredo said.
The next year in Nebraska, the INS tried checking the paperwork of 26,000 workers at 40 meat-packing plants. Some 4,700 workers had problems with their identification, and 3,000 disappeared rather than be interviewed, Tancredo said. Both Nebraska senators attended a meeting at which the meatpackers demanded the INS leave them alone.
In Tancredo's view, "You have to go after employers who are hiring these people because then you will dry up demand.
"If we stopped 99 or 90, 80 or even 70 percent of the employment, we would see a marked reduction in the number of people here because they'll go home," he said.
He has hopes that Michael Garcia, the federal terrorism prosecutor recently named to head ICE, will crack down on employers, but he readily admits that nothing has changed in Congress that might allow that.
Tancredo said he has about 120 supporters in the House for his "secure borders" measures. But "in the Senate, there aren't 10."
Nor does he have his own president or the Republican leadership on board.
"I confront my colleagues with this: Do you want a country with open borders or not?"
Denver immigration lawyer Donna Lipinski agrees with Tancredo that current policies don't work. But she says no amount of enforcement will stop the flow of illegal workers as long as the economy needs their services and there is no legal way for them to come.
The current system is unfair for both workers and employers, she says. "Nobody is a winner."
She favors expansion of temporary work visas that would allow someone to cross the border and work legally for a period of time. She said it also would help the government know who comes into the country and curb the market in counterfeit documents.
Sen. John McCain, a Republican from the border state of Arizona, introduced a bill recently that would allow foreign workers into the United States to fill jobs that Americans don't take after being listed for 14 days on a government database. The workers could apply for residency status after three years on a job.
You got it! the Republicans are in charge now, ya know.
The only good part about this (I heard Kleagle Byrd say) is the blacks go on the federal payroll in AmeriCorps and sit on their rears and do nothing so the Mexicans can get the jobs where they have to work. It is good training for the dependent blacks and leaves them unqualified to work.
Now that would really work.
It is a shame we can't put more Federal Agents on this, but the FBI has to concentrate on Porngraphy and the DEA and Border Patrol/Customs/Coast Guard on Drugs because these are more important to the administration.
Damn Fools better worry about whether or not we even exist as a Nation before they worry about us being doper perverts.
So9
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