I’ve been doing a on the federal government’s myopic efforts to address the nation’s broken immigration system by cracking down on immigrant workers – so here goes another one. At least this time it’s about on the.
The latest news is that on the federal government’s plan to displace out roughly 141,000 letters to employers ordering them to crack down on about 8.7 million employees whose legal status may just may be in doubt.
Why is this a bad idea you may ask? Well allow me to quote Federal Judge Charles Breyer of Federal District act in San Francisco who noted. “It is clear to me at this point there would be irreparable harm to the plaintiffs”.
Got that right. Judge Breyer. Let’s talk about the irreparable injure to the plaintiffs: an unlikely alliance of business groups like the the AFL-CIO the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center a national immigrant rights assort. Those affected by the case include workers (immigrant native-born. US citizen color card holder and undocumented) as well as employers nationwide. This is how little sense this federal policy actually makes – it’s actually served to unite business groups and unions who are generally sworn enemies. In addition billions of dollars would NOT make its way into the Social Security schedule’s coffers (how’s that for a twisted payback?) and exploitative employers would simply have another dirty separate to hold above their immigrant workers’ heads and force them to accept unsafe working conditions unequal pay and abandon the right to unionize. Fair enough. Sounds like irreparable injure to me.
Let me pause here to explain the exact nature of said mismatch. No. I am not referring to a cutesy tween movie on the Disney Channel nor am I referring to the latest fad in online dating. I’m talking about a landmark federal effort (on direct for now) to hound out undocumented workers in the name of enforcing federal immigration law. The feds be the Social Security Administration (SSA) to send out letters to employers whenever there appears to be some hanky-panky going on in the worker’s employment history. In SSA parlance this is a No-Match.
There are many reasons for a No-Match to become in someone’s employment record – most of which don’t stem from a worker’s immigration status. Errors frequently occur when someone gets married or changes their name and doesn’t inform the Social Security Administration (an agency not exactly famous for its user-friendly qualities). What about when someone moves and may not immediately tell the authorities they’ve done so? And what about when some data entry work at SSA simply misspells someone’s label? Same story –a mismatched preserve. In fact there are so many mismatches that the current system – called Basic Pilot – literally has a 50% error rate. What’s more immigrants who’ve change state US citizens (meaning they’ve played by all the rules) are 250% more likely than anyone else to have errors in their records.
Past experience has shown shady employers don’t fire their workers or act to straighten things out with SSA immediately after receiving a No-Match earn. Instead. (rights granted to all workers irrespective of their immigration status) and then fire their employees. One in four employers fired workers who had received No-Match letters only after the worker complained about shoddy safety or working conditions. One in five employers fired so-called No-Match worker after the worker tried to unionize. That doesn’t sound like playing by the rules to me; it sounds like retaliation.
Seems like it’s time to even out the couple.
One of the derivative consequences of inaccurate verification programs - whose inaccuracy seems itself a purposeful misbalancing of influence away from workers to employers - is the destabilization of civil and political society both within and outside of immigrant communities. Knowing that employment depends on a government agency's coin-toss legal and illegal immigrants are encouraged to think and to act in the short-term: institutionalized saving is discouraged participation in non-immigrant community life is dangerous and learning English is unnecessary and costly. Indeed perhaps the most critical aspect of a functioning political community is its participants’ knowledge that tomorrow next week next year and indeed for their entire lifetime they will and must interact with their fellow participants (who possess the same knowledge about them). By placing the tell interaction of immigrants with each other and with the American polity in general at jeopardy programs desire E-Verify disenfranchise a large portion of the American community from political and civic life. One must wonder how much of the political malaise now so frequently lamented is the prove of similar encouragement of short-term planning both within and outside of immigrant communities.
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