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New federal push to fire illegal immigrants

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CactusCarlos:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/21/MNQ3VOJI7.DTL


--- Quote ---The Bush administration unveiled a revised rule Friday threatening businesses with prosecution unless they fire employees identified in government records as possible illegal immigrants, offering a new explanation but virtually no change in content from the regulation that a San Francisco federal judge blocked in October.

The Department of Homeland Security announced the new version of the so-called no-match rule on its Web site and said it would invite public comments for 30 days.

The department then plans to ask U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer to lift his injunction. At the same time, it has asked a federal appeals court to overturn the Oct. 10 decision by the judge, who found that unions and businesses had raised serious questions about the rule's legality.

"The no-match rule is an important tool for cracking down on illegal hiring practices while providing honest employers with the guidance they need," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a statement.

Opponents said the new plan, which like the old one would be based on discrepancies in Social Security records, would harm large numbers of legal workers, foster discrimination against the foreign-born and drive up business costs.

"This misguided attempt to fit the square peg of immigration enforcement into the round hole of Social Security benefits is a guarantee of increased discrimination and erroneous terminations," said Kathleen Campbell Walker, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Chertoff announced the first version of the new rule in August to toughen a little-enforced provision of a 1986 immigration law prohibiting businesses from knowingly employing illegal immigrants.

In the past, employers have been able to comply with the law by obtaining identification documents from new workers. After that, the government notifies employers if the Social Security number on an employee's W-2 tax form doesn't match the number in the Social Security database. That worker may not have earnings credited for Social Security benefits, but no action is taken against the employer.

Under the new rule, employers who get no-match letters would have 90 days to resolve the discrepancy and an additional three days for an employee to submit a new, valid Social Security number. After that, an employer who failed to fire the worker would be subject to civil fines or criminal prosecution.

Unions, joined in a lawsuit by major business groups, said the government often sends no-match letters mistakenly because of clerical errors in recording numbers and because workers change their names after marriage, divorce or for other reasons. They said the new rule would lead to the firings of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and legal residents.

Breyer, in his Oct. 10 injunction, said the unions' prediction of wholesale firings of legal workers was plausible. He stopped short of deciding whether the proposed rule was legal, but said Homeland Security had failed to explain its reversal of a decade-old government policy of not prosecuting employers on the basis of a discrepancy in a worker's Social Security number.

In the new draft unveiled Friday, Homeland Security disputed that the rule amounted to a policy change, arguing that it had always made it clear to employers that they should investigate the reasons for no-match letters and could not simply ignore them.

But even if the rule represents a change in policy, the department said, it is justified to clear up employers' confusion about their obligations under the immigration law.

The policy is also "justified by the growing evidence and consensus within and outside government that ... no-matches are a legitimate indicator of possible illegal work by unauthorized aliens," the department said.

It said businesses have acknowledged as much by declaring that the new rule would have a devastating effect on certain industries, like agriculture, that employ large numbers of undocumented workers.
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