30 states are considering bills to target employers of aliens

June 24, 2006

At least 30 are frustrated by Congress' inability to adopt major immigration reform, and are opening a new assault on illegal immigrants by passing laws of their own targeting employers who hire undocumented workers.

Colorado has empowered its Department of Labor and Employment to investigate contractors working for the state government for violating federal laws against hiring illegal aliens. Pennsylvania stiffened penalties for employers who receive government grants or loans and hire illegal aliens, and Pennsylvania lawmakers are debating legislation to target all employers statewide. Georgia and Massachusetts, along with Colorado, now require all public employers to use a federal work authorization program to verify that no illegal aliens have been hired.

States across the nation have considered more than 75 bills targeting employers of illegal immigrants this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). The focus on employers comes at a time when states increasingly are frustrated with federal border enforcement and when politicians up for election this fall are under intense public pressure to crack down on illegal aliens.

In all, states have considered nearly 500 bills addressing immigration concerns in 2006,

Experts on both sides of the immigration debate said the new interest in employer sanctions represents a shift in how states are coping with the estimated 12 million illegal aliens now in the United States. However, they question whether states' efforts will deter businesses from taking advantage of cheap illegal immigrant labor.

Most of the state proposals focus only on public contractors, lack enforcement mechanisms, or provide businesses easy loopholes to avoid sanctions. Proposals with the harshest penalties, such as imposing fines or revoking the business licenses of employers caught hiring illegal aliens, have failed because of partisan bickering and heavy lobbying from the business community.

Arizona lawmakers dropped employer sanctions from immigration control measures they sent to the November ballot last week. Earlier this month Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) vetoed a major immigration package that had included employer sanctions. Lacking votes to override the governor, the Republican-controlled Legislature instead bypassed her veto pen by putting proposals on the ballot asking voters to amend the state Constitution to make English the official state language and to prevent illegal aliens from receiving a variety of state services.

At least a dozen other states (Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin) also have considered legislation that would have imposed harsh penalties on employers of illegal aliens.

'Without federal enforcement against employers, [state] measures are purely cosmetic,' said Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter immigration controls.

Targeting employers is the latest effort by state lawmakers to make it harder for undocumented immigrants to live and work in their states. Georgia and Kansas recently joined Arizona and Virginia in restricting certain social services from illegal immigrants. Maine joined 39 other states in prohibiting illegal immigrants from getting driver's licenses. Colorado appointed a full-time investigator to pursue identification document counterfeiters, and six states (Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi and Virginia) made human trafficking a felony to target abusers who force illegal immigrants into sweatshops or prostitution.

Targeting employers in the hope of stemming the tide of illegal immigration is not new. Twelve states adopted laws barring employers from hiring illegal aliens before Congress made it federal law in 1986. The assumption was that enforcement would deter illegal immigration and therefore improve wages and working conditions for U.S. workers.

Twenty years later the employer sanctions obviously haven't worked, and clearly there's a huge policy vacuum that states either by frustration or by design are walking into.

Advocates for stronger immigration controls argue that federal employer sanctions haven't been effective because they've rarely been enforced in the past 20 years. The Washington Post has reported that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) scaled back work-site enforcement by 95 percent between 1999 and 2003, prosecuting only four employers for hiring illegal aliens in 2003 compared to 182 in 1999.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which succeeded the INS when immigration control fell under the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003, has dramatically stepped up workplace enforcement in recent months with several high-profile raids in Maryland, Kentucky and other states that netted more than a thousand illegal alien workers.

Federal authorities are trying to look tough on enforcement to boost President Bush's chances of getting immigration reform legislation through Congress, said Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies. Bush supports the Senate bill, which includes controversial measures to offer amnesty to some illegal aliens who are already here and would greatly expand the number of foreign guest workers allowed to enter the U.S.

'This kind of high profile enforcement needs to be accompanied by routine day-to-day enforcement to restore a sense of order and end this idea of impunity,' Krikorian said.