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Employers brace for crackdown on immigrants</font size><font size="4">
Restaurants and hotels worry they will lose workers</font size></center>
By DAN RICHMAN
P-I REPORTER
Restaurants, hotels and other low-wage Washington businesses could be hit hard by tough new immigration rules released Friday, union officials here said, echoing concerns from labor groups and employers across the country.
Among the most worrisome are new requirements on employers over whether a worker's name and Social Security number match federal records.
The new rules, which take effect in 30 days, say that, under some circumstances, employers will be required to fire employees with non-matching Social Security numbers or face legal sanctions.
Several employers declined this week to talk about the changes, perhaps fearing they would invite unwanted attention if they acknowledged hiring undocumented workers.
But unions providing those employers with workers -- many of them undocumented -- said the companies are alarmed.
"The companies I deal with in the janitorial industry are very concerned about this, because some of them get no-match letters. But you can't just by that expect to know whether a person is documented," said Sergio Salinas, president of Service Employees International Union Local 6.
"They are trying to comply, but they say it could happen they have undocumented workers, and they're worried they won't be able to continue their business normally."
SEIU Local 6 represents 3,700 cleaners and security guards at commercial buildings in King County and in Tacoma. Among them are a significant number of undocumented workers, Salinas said.
"Normally the cleaning industry is an entry-level job for immigrants," he said. "We don't know and we don't want to know if they're here illegally. That's for the employer to find out."
Under the rules issued by the Bush administration, employers who receive a so-called no-match letter must be able to show within 90 days why an employee's Social Security number does not match the government database. The reason could be a clerical error or a name change because of marriage. However, if legal status can't be confirmed, the employee must be fired.
Employers who don't comply could be fined up to $10,000 per worker or face criminal penalties.
"There has been ambiguity about how employers should respond" when a worker's name and number don't match the database, said Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Veronica Valdes in an interview Thursday. "We're going to eliminate that. We're not going to accept excuses."
Some employers are worried because names and Social Security numbers often don't match the Social Security Administration database owing to typos, clerical errors, misunderstandings or cultural differences in naming practices.
Under the new rules, employers effectively become surrogates for the government, charged with determining the validity of documents workers give them and facing penalties if they're wrong, the unions said. The unions also fear that employers will fire workers indiscriminately rather than risking federal sanctions.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said they were forced to beef up enforcement after Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill.
"We're going as far as we possibly can without Congress acting," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
Recognizing the crackdown could hurt some industries, particularly agriculture, Gutierrez said the Labor Department will try to make existing temporary worker programs easier to use and more efficient.
The American Farm Bureau Federation, an industry group representing 75 percent of U.S. farmers, estimates at least half the nation's 1 million farm workers lack valid Social Security numbers. Losing them would devastate the industry, particularly fruit and vegetable growers, which rely heavily on manual labor, farmers said.
Other new rules beef up security at the U.S. borders, strengthen efforts to keep out gang members, toughen requirements that temporary workers leave the country when their visas expire and standardize the naturalization test.
But attracting the most attention are the changes in how employers must respond to no-match letters.
United Here Local 8 in Seattle, a union of 5,000 Washington hotel and restaurant employees, attacked the rules. Research analyst Stefan Moritz called them "increased enforcement measures without any solution in terms of a path to citizenship."
He predicted that the rules "will definitely be a factor in the hospitality industry."
Employers of construction workers worry they're being pushed into serving as the government's proxy for determining a worker's citizenship, said Eric Franklin, a spokesman for the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters, which represents about 8,500 carpenters in Western Washington.
"The documents workers give you often appear to be authentic," Franklin said. "If they later turn out not to be, how were employers supposed to know that? The devil is in the details, and there will be lawsuits for years to come if these rules go into effect."
The building trades are filled with undocumented workers, many of whom have moved from agriculture because the money is better, Franklin said.
Restaurants in Washington employ about 178,000 workers, some undocumented, "working and paying taxes -- but we're not giving them a pathway to citizenship," said Anthony Anton, chief executive of the Washington Restaurant Association.
Conservative groups lauded the move, saying it would be welcomed by those tired of watching illegal immigrants and their employers go unchallenged.
"We wish they had done this earlier, but even at this late stage, they have an opportunity to regain the confidence and support of the American public," said Dan Stein, president of Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Immigrant-rights organizations blasted the new rules as counterproductive.
"They would simply drive folks who are fired further underground, or the employers will pay them off the books," said Shankar Narayan, policy director for Seattle's Hate Free Zone, a rights organization serving the Pacific Northwest.
"We know the fired employees won't simply leave the country. They'll stick around to find even more marginal jobs."
About 2.5 million unauthorized workers arrived in the U.S. between 2000 and 2005, according to an April 2006 report from the Pew Hispanic Center.
"There's an economic reality that employers can't meet their labor needs given the unreasonable visa caps, so it's hardly surprising some employers are hiring undocumented folks," Narayan said.
"It's a system not satisfactory for either workers or employers."
RULES AT A GLANCE
The 26 rules announced by the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement affect border security, guest-worker programs, the workplace and assimilation into U.S. culture. Among other things, they:
* Reduce the number of documents usable to prove citizenship.
* Raise fines 25 percent on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants and expand investigations into such employers.
* Mandate a revised naturalization test.
The new employment rules are at
goto.seattlepi.com/r910.
This report includes information from The Associated Press and Cox News Service. P-I reporter Dan Richman can be reached at 206-448-8032 or
danrichman@seattlepi.com.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/327216_labor11.html?source=mypi