Immigration focus on employers

By Nicole Lucht

Friday, May 15, 2009 | midnight

A change in administration means a change in the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators handle undocumented workers. Instead of rounding up the workers and slapping the employer on the wrist, employers are going to be the focus — and with that comes heftier fines and penalties.

Employers have become the target of a federal campaign to dismantle some businesses’ practice of hiring workers in the country illegally.

Instead of primarily coming after the undocumented workers, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division will start to dole out heftier fines and cut off those businesses from receiving federal contracts.

The immigration division will beef up its workplace enforcement program to target “unscrupulous employers who prey upon these aliens by subjecting them to poor or unsafe working conditions or paying them substandard wages,” said Marcy Forman, director of investigations for the immigration office. She testified April 2 before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee.

Investigators are especially interested in those employers who engage in human trafficking, identity theft and Social Security fraud, as well as employers who staff undocumented workers at high security areas, such as airports.

Speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 6, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the agency “must engage in effective workplace enforcement to reduce the demand for illegal employment and protect employment opportunities for the nation’s lawful workforce.

“Active enforcement of our immigration laws must address not just the illegal workers themselves, but also the employers who hire illegal labor and fuel the phenomenon of illegal immigration into the United States,” she said.

She pointed to statistics of arrests last year: Of the 6,000 arrests related to workplace enforcement, just 135 of those were employers.

So, Homeland Security is releasing new protocols to change enforcement agents’ focus to employers.

“These new protocols reflect a renewed departmentwide focus on two different emphases for our immigration enforcement efforts,” Napolitano said. “First, targeting criminal aliens, and second, targeting employers who cultivate illegal workplaces by breaking the country’s laws and knowingly hiring illegal workers.”

Those employers are the “root cause of illegal immigration,” she said.

Enforcement agents will also be looking for other crimes the employers are engaged in, such as human trafficking, smuggling, visa fraud, harboring, identification document fraud (such as fake Social Security cards), money laundering and the mistreatment of workers.

Undocumented workers won’t get a free pass, though. They could still be arrested and deported, as allowed by law, depending on Homeland Security’s priorities and that worker’s criminal history.

Employee verification

Napolitano said her department is boosting the work eligibility verification program for employers.

The verification program allows employers to check whether employees are legal workers. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration are partners in the program.

“I am a strong believer that robust employer enforcement must be a critical part of our nation’s immigration system,” Napolitano said. “(Immigration and Customs Enforcement) will continue to seek out employers who want to comply with our nation’s immigration laws and provide them with the training and tools they need to minimize the risk of unwittingly hiring illegal workers.”

Across the country, 122,000 employers at 468,000 hiring locations are enrolled in the verification program.

Minimum wage goes up July 1

The state’s minimum wage will be increasing July 1.

Employees who receive qualified health benefits from their employers and earn less than $9.825 an hour and employees earning less than $11.325 an hour who do not receive qualified health benefits must be paid overtime whenever they work more than eight hours in a 24-hour period.

“What sets Nevada apart from the other states is that our daily overtime requirement is tied to the minimum wage,” Nevada Labor Commissioner Michael Tanchek said in a statement. “As the minimum wage goes up, so does the daily overtime requirement. As a result, some employers who are not currently paying daily overtime will have to do so once the new threshold rates go into effect.”

Nicole Lucht covers health care, workplace and banking issues for In Business Las Vegas and its sister publication, the Las Vegas Sun. She can be reached at 259-8832 or at [email protected].