Group Urges Retention of Employer Sanctions : Immigration: It calls for a worker identification system also. Its report discounts job bias on eve of a study that could lead to revoking the penalties.

Anticipating the findings of a General Accounting Office report on employer sanctions, the Federation for American Immigration Reform issued a report Tuesday calling for continuing penalties against employers who hire illegal immigrants and for the creation of a worker identification system.

Immigrant rights groups quickly rejected the idea of a worker identification system as a civil rights intrusion, arguing that it would be similar to forcing residents to carry a national identity card.

The Washington-based federation, a group that seeks to limit immigration, released its report as GAO officials prepared to issue their third and final report to Congress on the impact of sanctions against employers. Under a provision of the immigration reform law, Congress may change or revoke the sanctions if the GAO finds that they caused a pattern of discrimination. That report is expected to be released Thursday.

In its own report, “Making Sanctions Work: The Next Three Years,” the immigration reform federation contradicted studies that concluded that sanctions had caused widespread discrimination by employers against foreign-appearing citizens and legal residents.

“Three years after their institution, the employer sanctions provisions of (the Immigration Reform Control Act) have proven themselves to be generally effective and enforceable,” the report stated.

Dan Stein, executive director of the federation, said he has not seen the GAO report but predicted that it would not find that discrimination has occurred as a result of the immigration reform law. He rejected studies that have found discrimination as “based on fatally flawed surveys.”

Stein predicted that the GAO report might find “some problems” with the law because employers did not know what types of identification to accept from prospective employees as verification of a legal right to work in the United States. He said that those problems could be fixed easily with the implementation of a secure employment identification system, using computerized data bases to verify workers’ eligibility.

Under such a system, all workers would show prospective employers a government-issued work authorization document. The document--which might be similar to or ultimately replace the current Social Security card--could be fed into a data base of the nation’s eligible workers to determine whether the job applicant was in the country legally, Stein said.

“Use of the techniques we recommend . . . would eliminate any incentive employers may have to discriminate against those who are entitled to work in this country,” he said. “And, most importantly, the magnet of easy jobs for illegal immigrants would be switched off.”

Francisco Garcia, national director for immigrant rights at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the proposal would create a “pass-card society” in which some people would be eligible to work and others would not.

Garcia, among other immigrant rights leaders, cited GAO “sting procedures” to detect employer discrimination. In one example, he said, officials with heavy Latino accents called New York-area employers and were denied jobs, but callers without accents were granted interviews.

“That suggests a predisposition to discriminate,” Garcia said. “No document is going to solve the problem of discrimination.”

Among the reports that concluded that sanctions led to discrimination were studies by the Mexican American defense fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

“I think we’ve reached the point in this discussion that everyone agrees that sanctions cause some form of discrimination,” Garcia said. “The question is: What do we do about it?”

Cecilia Munoz, senior immigration policy analyst with the National Council of La Raza, a civil rights organization, said that groups opposed to employer sanctions would continue to call for their repeal, no matter what the GAO report says.