INS Agents Play Teacher on Employer Sanctions

The last time immigration agent Edward Smyth showed up at the Pico Rivera offices of the California Box Co., he was not a welcome guest.

During a November, 1985, raid on the plant, Smyth and fellow Immigration and Naturalization Service investigators herded off 20 illegal alien workers so quickly that one of the owners, John Widera, later complained that his box-stamping machines were left running unattended.

When Smyth reappeared in Widera’s office doorway last week, he was not there for a repeat performance. Instead, Smyth sat down to chat amiably with a stunned Widera about the employer sanctions provisions of the new federal immigration law and their future impact on businesses that hire immigrants.

‘Plan to Be a Good Boy’

Widera told Smyth right off that he intended to comply with the law. “We’ve already started learning about the law,” he assured Smyth during his visit. “From now on, I plan to be a good boy.”

Across the country, immigration agents who have spent years hunting down illegal aliens have suddenly found themselves placed in the unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable role of educators. For the next year, they will be charged with explaining the new sanctions, which require businesses to collect and inspect identification papers for all employees hired since last Nov. 6, the day the law was signed.

INS officials have asked their agents to make contact with at least 1 million American employers by next June--a yearlong education period that the agency considers crucial to making the sanctions law work.

Widera is the kind of employer the agency is depending on. A man who once angrily testified in court that he and his employees were held “hostage” to repeated INS raids on his plant, Widera said he has given up fighting the INS. In recent weeks, he made his managers take home videocassettes detailing the workings of the law. And he intends to personally review files of all newly hired employees to make sure they comply with INS requirements.

Far more crucial, however, is whether the rest of the nation’s 8 million businesses will be as willing to become unofficial arms of the immigration agency. “One wonders whether the agency should distribute little INS badges to every employer,” said Virginia Thomas, a labor relations attorney with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Many large businesses and trade and industry associations have already been conducting workshops, training personnel officers and changing their filing systems to adapt to their new roles under the law. In California alone, 1,500 firms have participated in seminars sponsored by the INS and the Merchants and Manufacturers Assn. of Southern California, according to Louis Custrini, an official of the group.

But tens of thousands of smaller merchants still have only a hazy awareness of the law and little knowledge of its specific provisions. Thomas and other critics of the INS’ handling of the law worry that an insufficient number of businesses will learn its details over the next year and complain that the agency has not adequately clarified the process under which the law will be enforced.

“We’re afraid that despite all their lip service about education, the INS will end up enforcing the law through fear tactics,” Thomas said. “If that happens, the law is bound to fail.”

Officials dismiss such concerns, insisting that they will seek sanctions against only the most flagrant violators of the law in the coming year and will give even the most notorious illegal immigrant-dependent businesses several chances to become familiar with the law before prosecuting them.

“We’re not out to rack up as many businesses as we can,” said John Brechtel, the INS assistant regional commissioner for investigations. “We don’t have enforcement quotas. We see the next year as a year of education.”

Half of Agents Assigned

INS Commissioner Alan Nelson has ordered half of his agency’s investigators to work solely on educating employers over the next 11 months. In the INS Western region that has meant equipping half of the agency’s 40 investigators with Thomas Brothers maps and sending them out into downtown business districts, suburban industrial parks and rural main streets to drop in on as many employers as possible.

For Smyth, a 15-year INS veteran, it has meant dressing in suits every day, piling a mound of employer sanction handbooks and forms into the back seat of his creaky Chevy Citation and becoming as chipper as a veteran brush salesman.

He received a salesman’s lukewarm reception at Graphics Inc., one of the businesses he visited inside the Town Center Business Park in Santa Fe Springs. As Smyth knocked on the typesetting firm’s front door, he eyed a window sticker that read: “We shoot every third salesman. The second one just left.”

His reception from general manager Jerry McLendon, wearing Bermuda shorts and a red T-shirt, was only slightly more enthusiastic.

“Yeah. More forms to fill out,” McLendon said. “We still haven’t figured out how to deal with the new income tax and now this.”

McLendon had heard of the new law, but like many other employers visited that morning by Smyth, was unfamiliar with its fine points. Smyth did not stay long enough to go over the details, but told McLendon that any questions would be answered by a phone call to an 800-line that the agency has set up.

Brief Visits Criticized

Agency critics such as Thomas of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say that such brief visits fail to give employers a confident sense of their obligations under the law. And even if a million employers are eventually contacted, Thomas worries that many of them--particularly small businesses--will not get adequate instruction.

“It’s just not enough,” Thomas said. “The INS agents need to sit down and go over this law with employers, point by point. Big corporate firms have lawyers that will do that for them. But mom-and-pop businesses are out there in the dark.”

Frank Johnston, the INS regional employer-labor relations coordinator, said business owners who remain unfamiliar with the law should either set up a meeting with an investigator or attend monthly seminars that the INS sponsors, such as one planned Tuesday at the Veterans Administration Complex in West Los Angeles.

“We have neither the manpower nor the funding to do everything ourselves,” said Dan Purseglove, spokesman for the INS’ Los Angeles district. “The Internal Revenue Service did nothing compared to the educational effort we’re making. But we can only do just so much.”