Obama’s E-Verify and I-9 audits are worse than Bush’s raids and must be stopped
ICE’s workplace attacks are continuing under the Obama administration, and they are threatening everybody’s rights.
Throughout the United States, hundreds of thousands of families are being uprooted, torn apart, and destroyed. The tragedy is due to the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the immigration debate and the resulting “no-match” letters, workplace raids, E-Verify – and now ICE I-9 audits.
In mid 2007, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued rules giving companies the green light to fire employees for whom they received “no-match” letters from the Social Security Administration (SSA). The letters charge that SSA’s records show a different name for the Social Security numbers the workers are using.
Fortunately, before this rule took effect, labor unions and community organizations filed suit against it, and later that year, a federal court prohibited ICE and Social Security from implementing the rule.
The unions and community organizations continued their court fight, and in late 2009 ICE withdrew all its proposedrules regarding “no-match” letters. In early 2008, with President Bush close to leaving office, ICE launched the biggest immigration raid in U.S. history against workers at the Agroprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.
Neighboring communities and the general public were outraged by ICE’s inhumane treatment of the meatpacking workers and the imprisonment of half of Postville’s population. The raid made headlines worldwide, and people all over the United States drove to Postville to demand an end to all raids.
So when the Obama administration took office in 2009, it found ICE’s “no-match” letter rules blocked in court and workplace raids distasteful after Postville. Instead, the administration has decided to go after with the E-Verify program and ICE I-9 audits.
The two programs have now had far more devastating effects than Bush’s raids. Hundreds of thousands of union and non-union workers in factories, warehouses, laundries, restaurants, meatpacking plants, and janitorial services have lost their jobs as a result.
E-Verify is an electronic option available to all companies for checking the eligibility to work of current and potential employees. All federal contractors are required to use the system, and 14 states have imposed it on state agencies and on companies that receive state contracts. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2010, the system processed nearly 600,000 queries compared to fewer than 250,000 a year earlier, more than doubling. The number is predicted to double again in 2011.
The other option is the I-9 audit. All employers must complete an I-9 form for every employee hired after 1986. Employees must present documents showing they are legally in the country – a U.S. passport, for instance, or the combination of a driver’s license and a Social Security card.
Without an accurate I-9 form, the employee is working illegally, and the employer can be jailed and/or fined. They are under considerable pressure terminate any such worker.
That pressure increases with a I-9 audit, ICE’s on-site inspection of an these forms. ICE gives an employer three days’ notice of an audit. (If it has an investigationunderway, it may give no notice). In 2010, ICE conducted more than 2,400 such audits, and that number is expected to triple in 2011.
Workers and communities across the country are currently going through the pain of I-9 audits. In Minneapolis, some 1,200 janitors lost their jobs. In Boston, workers lost their jobs at a vendor for Fenway Park. In Brewster, Washington, at least 550 workers were fired by a big fruit-processing company due an I-9 auditabout a quarter of the city’s population.
Besides causing serious hardship to immigrant workers and their families, the ICE campaigns of both Bush and Obama have undermined the labor unions they belong to. Right now, unions are engaged in a tough fight for survival, and if organized labor gets destroyed, workers’ rights and the dreams of all working people are in danger.
