Employers check potential employees documents (social security card, etc) when hiring a new person. Illegals use bad social security & other documents. Many times, it is stolen information.
Employers get a "no match" letter. In the past, many employees did nothing about this. Now, they have to fire the person (unless they can correct it). Illegals will not be able to get work.
What will be the fallout of this? Are there illegals in the Spanish congregations? Will we have masses & masses of angry illegal workers? Who is going to pick our fields?
Skeeter
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U.S. targets illegal workers FOCUS ON BOGUS SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS By Javier Erik Olvera
Mercury News Article Launched: 08/11/2007 01:32:30 AM PDT
Eleuterio knew it was against the law when he sneaked into the United States 11 years ago and used someone else's Social Security number to find work.
For years, the 26-year-old, along with millions of other illegal laborers, escaped the eye of government enforcers, buttressing the nation's agriculture industry by doing, as he put it, "the work nobody else wants to do."
Friday, they became the focal point of the Bush administration's newest push against illegal immigration, a sweeping effort to step up enforcement of the nation's existing rules set to begin next month.
Authorities are promising a widespread crackdown, concentrating on Social Security fraud with new scrutiny over workers who use bogus numbers and increased fines against those who employ them. To avoid those higher fines, employers must fire any employees whose numbers can't be verified within 90 days of being notified.
The announcement has revived the immigration debate and sent ripples from Washington, D.C., to the Salinas Valley. At least half - and as many as 80 percent - of the United States' estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants have used false paperwork to secure jobs.
"This is going to hurt everyone," said Eleuterio, a strawberry picker and father of two from Watsonville who didn't want his last name used because of his immigration status.
The push comes two months after Congress failed to pass President Bush's proposed immigration overhaul, a package
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of laws that would have tightened borders, clamped down on employers and set up a series of guest-worker programs.
Instead, the administration pushed forward by looking at other tools to crack down on immigration without a decision from lawmakers. The hope, said Michael Chertoff and Carlos Gutierrez, secretaries of Homeland Security and Commerce, respectively, is to put the onus on Congress to take up reforms once again. Other provisions include tighter border control, a system to track deportations and reduced processing times for immigrant background checks.
Although some conservative groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform lauded the decision, saying it would be welcomed by a population tired of watching illegal immigrants and their employers go unchallenged, labor experts and others warned of economic devastation.
"It doesn't deal with the reality of the service needs of this state, which depends heavily on illegal immigration," said Mike Garcia, president of the local Service Employees International Union. "If you try to remove these people, whole industries would go belly up."
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, noted that although the White House is enforcing laws already on the books, reforming those laws would have been the best solution.
"The impact is apt to be a significant one in several aspects of the economy," she said.
The Social Security Administration each year analyzes millions of Social Security numbers that for several reasons, including fraud and human error, don't match names provided by employers.
About 8.6 million "no match" letters will soon go out to employees across the country for the 2006 tax year, said Lowell Kepke, spokesman for the office's San Francisco branch. Social Security earnings for those workers - billions of dollars a year - are placed in a holding fund until it can be determined where the money should go. The pot of unclaimed earnings stands at about $585 billion.
Industry leaders - chiefly in the agriculture, construction and service fields - began to brace themselves this week for a rocky transition after officials indicated a crackdown would be announced.
The state's $32 billion agricultural industry, which relies on immigrants to make up the majority of the 450,000 employees it needs each harvest, would be among the hardest hit. Experts estimate that up to 70 percent of farmworkers use false paperwork - known in the fields as "papeles chuecos" - to receive their weekly checks.
"It will result in a loss of perishable crop," said Bob Perkins, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, adding that the bureau's 500 members would adhere to the laws.
The Salinas Valley, where the farm bureau is based, is home to what he calls "full-time workers," who have jobs tending farms year-round because of the various crops that are grown.
He predicts the region - home to vast lettuce and strawberry fields - will initially be fine because a large number of laborers in the region live there legally. But he anticipates that those workers will be in high demand for other jobs and eventually be enticed from the fields by industries offering higher wages and less-grueling work.
California's restaurant industry also expects a blow to its workforce, which studies show has a high number of undocumented immigrants, although the number is unclear.
"It's going to cause a serious issue given the tightening of the California labor market," said Jot Condie, president and chief executive officer of the California Restaurant Association.
Friday morning, Condie said, he received a document from the Department of Homeland Security outlining the stricter sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants.
"It's burdensome for the employer," he said, "because they're being asked to do some of the enforcement work for the Department of Homeland Security."
Labor expert Katie Quan said federal leaders have failed to consider the fallout from the new push: With millions of people losing their jobs, employers will scramble to fill behind them - and that will lead to a new influx of people crossing the border illegally.
"Why enforce now?" asked Quan, associate chairwoman of the University of California-Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education.
For Eleuterio, who has spent years looking over his own shoulder, the concern now is his 6-year-old son. The boy, who was born in the United Sates, has already started school and Eleuterio said he doesn't want to pull him out. It wouldn't be fair to the boy, he said, and to his future.
Said Eleuterio: "This is going to ruin families."