Manager Pleads Guilty in Mississippi Immigration Raid

This report from ABC News details that guilty plea of Jose Humberto Gonzalez, a manager at Howard Industries who admitted to knowingly hiring undocumented workers.  Although I'm very pleased that prosecutors are FINALLY going after employers, this report seems to indicate that Mr. Gonzalez was a fall guy--a middle manager who got scapegoated.  It seems highly unlikely that Mr. Gonzalez was the sole perpetrator here.

The only company executive indicted in the nation's largest workplace raid on illegal immigrants pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of conspiracy.

Jose Humberto Gonzalez pleaded guilty to one charge of a 12-count indictment that alleged he knowingly hired illegal immigrants at Howard Industries, where he was personnel director.  Prosecutors would not discuss details of the plea agreement.

More than 600 were arrested in the August 2008 raid on Howard's plant in the south Mississippi town of Laurel. Gonzalez, 45, was the human resources manager at the sprawling facility, which makes electrical transformers.

Several illegal immigrants have been convicted of identity theft and deported.
Gonzalez, wearing a dark brown suit, said little during the hearing other than responding to the judge with yes or no answers.

The court docket was backed up, so U.S. District Judge Keith Starrett conducted plea changes for two other men in unrelated cases at the same time as Gonzalez. That left Gonzalez standing before the judge next to a shackled crack dealer in a red prison jumpsuit.
 
Gonzalez refused to comment as he left the federal courthouse holding hands with his wife.
Gonzalez attorney, P.K. Holmes of Arkansas, passed out a written statement saying Gonzalez is prohibited from commenting on specifics of the case even though he wants to and "accepts responsibility for his actions."

He faces up to five years on the conspiracy charge. Sentencing is March 31.
As part of his plea, Gonzalez admitted to elements of the conspiracy, including hiring workers "regardless of concerns about their lawful status."

In December 2005, many workers fled the plant as rumors spread of a coming raid. Gonzalez "was summoned to the plant" to call workers and reassure them there was no raid and to tell them to come back to work, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gaines Cleveland told the court.

Forensic Audits taking the Place of ICE Raids

There are days when I think that we will have a shot a real immigration reform next year.  The rise in forensic audits by the IRS is the reason for that hope.  For years now I have blogged that enforcing immigration does not have to include the drama of the immigration raid.  In fact, I think that is the most counter productive way to manage our immigration violations.  Unless, of course, your goal is the make a big media splash and placate the rabid anti-immigrant lobby, proving that your agency is "doing something."

I have long proposed that the more effective way to go about this is to ferret out the employers who hire and therefore lure immigrants into our system without authorization.  The employers are the ones who directly benefit from the current system, and they are the most likely perpetrators of abuse of their highly vulnerable workforce.  But aside from the inherent justice of this approach, sending in the IRS will serve two important functions: 1) it will scare the pants off even the most egregious immigration violator and 2) the employers will have to pay fines.  Lots of fines.  And let's face it, no one wants to be on the bad side of the IRS.

Why do I think that this approach will be more effective?  I see things this way:  employers are hiring undocumented employees.  They need the labor, and like the benefits of not paying adequate wages and benefits.  Once this system becomes costly to the employer, they will be less likely to engage in the practice.  However, they will still need the workforce, and will be more likely to support a short-term worker visa program, or other alternatives, to fill their labor needs.  This, I hope, will encourage a more balance discussion on immigration and reform.

The quote below is a excerpt from the Contra Costa Times. 

Today, those high-profile raids have been replaced with a quieter but more expansive arm of immigration enforcement: The forensic auditor.

"Being an employer, it's like getting a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. You panic," said Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League. "It's a real frightening deal for employers."

Most audits are invisible to the public, and land with a softer impact than a raid, but they are common enough to worry some employers.

Federal agents this month are probing more than 150 California businesses and 1,000 nationwide, the latest in a surge of civil inspections that began in the spring.

"They were selected because we received leads or intelligence indicating there might be problems with their workforce, and these businesses might have (connections) to public safety and critical infrastructure," said ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

The inspections typically begin with a phone call and are followed by visits from auditors with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, who ask to review the I-9 forms that all employees must fill out to verify their identity and eligibility to work in the United States.

"A lot of people in business now know a company who's had an I-9 audit," said lawyer Dan Brown, who was a policy director at ICE during the Bush administration. "They are more nervous and taking the threat more seriously."

Along with the threat of fines and a tarnished reputation, many companies face the added costs of attorneys to navigate the conflicting demands of the government and the company's own bargaining agreements with union workers.

Targets range from brand-name firms to small companies, but ICE will not identify them unless employers are dealt a fine. Among the industries targeted because they are part of the nation's "critical infrastructure" are those involved in the food supply chain, officials have said.

That means investigations are hitting California farmers, who are widely known to employ tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants but whose operations were largely untouched by immigration enforcement for years.

Before this year, when ICE visited a farm, dairy or packing plant, the agency was typically looking for one immigrant who was wanted by law enforcement, said Cunha, whose group advocates for Central Valley farmers.

Some food businesses are now finding that the government wants to review their entire workforce, including longtime employees they know from church or family functions. The audits are hardest for older farmers who still use carbon paper and punch-in time cards and have not transitioned into the digital age of record-keeping, Cunha said.

"There's so much confusion. No education has been done," said Cunha, who brought his concerns to ICE's director at a meeting last month in Washington, D.C. "I don't just blame this administration, but this is the one that's doing the audits with no education."

The inspections are a way of enforcing immigration law without launching disruptive and controversial raids, said Philip Martin, a professor in labor and agricultural economics at UC Davis. It's unclear if the new focus will be prolonged, he said.

"We don't know how it's going to play out," Martin said. "Workplace enforcement was never a terribly high priority."

Brown said the Obama administration's push for more employer audits marks a significant shift and has already caused companies across the country to fire employees who do not have the right paperwork.

"The use of I-9 inspections kind of tailed off in the late 1990s and then really tailed off after 9/11," said the former ICE official. "There was a bigger focus on homeland security and terrorism concerns rather than vanilla immigration enforcement."

Brown said some officials had not considered civil inspections effective because the audits were time-consuming and the fines too small to be taken seriously by corporations.

"With the Bush administration's focus on criminal investigators, I think probably a lot of employers didn't feel impacted by that," Brown said.

Fine amounts increased by 25 percent last year, so companies penalized for the first time must pay $375 to $3,200 for each unauthorized worker. ICE this year has issued final orders demanding companies pay almost $800,000, an increase from the less than $200,000 collected from a total of eight cases the year before.

Still, most of the nearly 2,000 companies audited this year will not end up being fined. Of the more than two dozen Northern California businesses investigated this summer, only one is likely to face a fine, Kice said.

"The vast majority were actually subsequently found to be in compliance," she said.

Dropping Immigration Charges against American Employers: This is why we have an immigration problem

This commentary is a based on a series of articles about the case Sholom Rubashkin, a manager of a kosher slaughterhouse who was charged with 72 counts of federal immigration violations, including harboring undocumented immigrants for profit, conspiracy to commit document fraud, and aiding and abetting document fraud.

The reasons for dismissing Mr. Rubashkin's immigration charges are this: he has been convicted for multiple counts of financial fraud, and his immigration convictions will not increase the time he serves in prison.

Hold on here--wasn't Rubashkin's Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville, Iowa the largest single-site raid in U.S. history? Didn't federal agents find 389 undocumented workers at the plant?

Where is FAIR? Where are the "Help Save" groups? Where is the indignant outrage of the Tea Party movement?

I think it's important to remember in instances like this--a perfect example of American hypocrisy--that while Mr. Rubashkin is not being held accountable for his role in the immigration violations, those who worked for him are either deported or sitting in immigrant detention centers. He won't have to pay for his substantial crimes facilitating undocumented immigration, but the immigrants themselves will.

The federal judge who was willing to overlook these crimes was sending a clear message to him and all the employers in the U.S.: if you break these laws, it's not going to be worth our time and money try to convict you. And why should he?

It's so much easier just to blame the immigrants.
in reference to: The Associated Press: Immigration charges dropped in slaughterhouse case (view on Google Sidewiki)

Iowa Meatpacker Manager on Trial for Immigration Violations

It's rare for American citizens, even those to knowingly violate immigration laws, to be held accountable for their actions. This article reports that Sholom Rubashkin is going to trial for a variety of charges, including 72 immigration violations.

E-verify? Is it a solution?

This is an interesting discussion on the E-verify system, the electronic system developed to inform employers if their applicants are actually legally authorized to work. The author argues that employer immigration enforcements are really the only way to address the failing immigration problem. He further states that the E-verify system, while imperfect, is a good start along this path.

I have no argument with finding a way to determine that employees are actually authorized to work in the U.S. I also support employer sanctions, because as this author seems to overlook, E-verify will not work if employers have decided they would prefer to hire an undocumented person. At the moment, E-verify is only required under certain circumstances, and as far as I can tell, there is no penalty for not using the system, even in those circumstances where it is required. There will have to come a time, if as a nation we are truly serious out reforming our immigration system, when we will have to come to acknowledge some hard truths. One of these is that we have to have strict penalties for employers and businesses that hire the undocumented.

The article ends with this statement:

The rational solution is a national identity card, which almost all other industrial countries have. The idea raises vehement opposition on the right and left, but we may go there through the back door as we create job cards, move toward universal health care and become ever more a part of massive information systems.

I could not agree more. Unfortunately, we may have a long road ahead of us before we're ready to face this necessity.

Immigration Reform and Employer Accountability

Now that the new Immigration Reform Bill has been on the table for a few weeks, the press is starting to report about the official positions of many special interest groups. This article from today's Washington Post is quite telling, and begs for an analysis.

Regular readers know that I am not a fan of increased border "security." Why? Over the last 30 years the U.S.-Mexico border has become increasingly guarded, and you can see what effects it has had on curtailing undocumented immigration. I think people who advocate for walls or a hermetically sealed frontera are hopelessly naive or delusional. It is physically impossible to effectively fence a 2000 mile border. Border enforcement is expensive and ineffective. Border security (especially calls for a wall) also highlight the U.S.'s xenophobic tendencies, which is not good.

However, I am an advocate of policing employer hiring practices because that is a border we can effectively police. Once employers learn that they will finally be accountable for breaking immigration laws, I believe the border issue will become irrelevant. As I've stated before, undocumented workers do not come to the U.S. to lounge around. They come to work. If they know that their chances of being hired after the get here are exceedingly unlikely, they will be more likely to either 1) stay home or 2) seek a legal means of working in the U.S. Thus, that long walk through the Arizona desert will not seem worth the risk if there is little or no chance of employment on the other end.

What of our fellow citizens in the business world? Certainly they want to work toward a solution here. Apparently not.

It seems that employers are already howling because

Among employers' top concerns is a provision imposing criminal liability for employers if their subcontractors hire illegal workers. The legislation would also increase civil penalties for employers caught hiring illegal workers.

The maximum criminal penalty for a pattern of hiring illegal workers would increase to $75,000 per illegal worker from $3,000.

Under the bill, a business might have to vet the employment files of its subcontractors, which lawyers said would be an onerous task.

Why would honest employers be worried increase criminal penalties and looking into the files of their subcontractors? That would be because the dirty secret of undocumented immigration is that subcontracting has been the preferred loophole of employers who really want to hire the undocumented but do not want to be implicated in the process. There are many problems with this immigration bill, but increasing employer sanctions is not among them. Unfortunately, business owners are a powerful lobby, and as in the past, it is likely that these increased sanctions will be whittled away until the amount to no more than a wrist slap.

I despise the anti-immigration folks who go after immigrants like they were the pariah of the U.S. Of course, the undocumented are, and always have been, easy targets. My hope is that those who oppose the undocumented will wake up and go after the real perpetrators here: the employers who thrive on undocumented labor. Despite my hopes, I doubt it will happen, however, because I suspect that employers themselves feed the fires of xenophobia, or at least allow them to smolder, that ultimately blame immigrants for a problem that they (employers) have perpetuated for decades.

It is very convenient to have people looking the other way when you benefit from breaking the law.

Baltimore Area Immigration Raids

ICE officials raided several businesses in the DC/Baltimore area this week. A total of 69 workers from Latin America and Africa were detained yesterday after raids on nine businesses that used a Baltimore-based temporary employment agency. The agency had been suspected of providing undocumented immigrants, ICE officials said.

ICE agents also seized the $600,000 bank account of Jones Industrial Network, the employment agency that allegedly supplied undocumented workers to local firms that included the sportswear manufacturer Under Armour and bonded warehouses in or near the Port of Baltimore.

For many years, employers who have wanted to benefit from undocumented labor have used employment agencies like Jones Industrial Network. It's a beautiful and simple way to get around the immigration laws: the employer can claim that the company authorized that the worker was legal (and thus be off the hook for breaking the law).

Because they had allegedly authorized the employment of the undocumented workers, ICE authorities said the Jones firm was the sole target of their criminal investigation because it bore responsibility for determining the legal status of workers it provided under contract. The Washington Post reports that no Jones officials faced arrest or charges yesterday. The question is,
will they ever?

When worlds collide

Undocumented immigration is a problem. Identity theft is a problem. These are two problems we definitely do not want to build on one another--and it looks like they already have.

The big immigration news today is that ICE busted six meat packing plants yesterday, arresting the undocumented workers for, are you ready? Identity theft. To be honest, I'm a little surprised that this has not happened sooner, or more likely, that ICE has not caught on to this sooner. The reason? There are huge flaws in the main program employed by the government to help employers authenticate workers' identification document. For years, undocumented workers would show up with fake social security cards and matching IDs. They were expensive, but the reality was, no one was watching too closely. The current immigration system gives a wink and a nod to employers who hire undocumented workers, and all the employer has to do is say the checked the ID, and it looked okay.

The weak government ID requirements and poor coordination with the Social Security Administration have allowed undocumented workers to use fake IDs for decades. Things started to get dicey, however, when when workers file their income taxes, and so many do. They do this because in many cases, they have deductions coming to them. However, the IRS is considerably better at ferreting out forged documents than ICE, so they usually report back to the filer that their social security number is invalid, and they are not eligible for refunds. So, what's the next best thing? Using a legitimate social security number that belongs to someone else! I have to admit, there are horrifying implications here. What if even a fraction of the 12 million undocumented workers in the U.S. decided they'd like to by stolen identification? Does anyone else out there see that this is a business "opportunity" that we do not want to give to identity thieves.

The other significant issue that came from this wide-spread raid is this: the workplace is just as significant, perhaps more so, as the border in addressing undocumented immigration. It's a sad state of affairs, however, when the meat packers are not held responsible for their actions as well. In yesterday's raids, not one employer was arrested or fined, which means that the workers who replace those who were arrested yesterday are very likely to be...

(can you guess?) Undocumented.