Employers Join Chorus of Immigration Law’s Critics : Documents: An uncommon alliance of business leaders and civil rights activists are calling for an end to sanctions for hiring illegal aliens.

Ed Bell thought he followed all the rules.

He told the workers in his packaging factory, most of whom are Latino, to get their papers in order to show they were entitled to hold jobs in this country. He helped some employees pay for their amnesty applications. And, he filled out pages and pages of government-issued forms.

All this to comply, Bell says, with landmark immigration legislation that makes it a crime to hire illegal or undocumented immigrants.

But Bell’s steps weren’t quite enough in the eyes of the law, and now he is locked in a tedious legal tangle with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. His American McNair firm, located in the city of Orange, is one of 214 businesses, companies and individuals in Los Angeles, Orange and surrounding counties that have been accused by the INS of violations ranging from knowingly employing illegal aliens to incorrectly filling out the paperwork.

“There’s nobody illegal here,” an exasperated Bell said, motioning with a sweep of his arms toward the factory workshop. “Why are they hassling me?”

The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act opened the way for hundreds of thousands of immigrants to apply for amnesty. But it also established sanctions, such as fines and jail time, against employers who give work to illegal immigrants. Under the law, a boss must ask for any of a number of permits or identification documents from a new employee to establish that employee’s right to work in the United States.

Immigrant rights advocates have long blamed the employer sanctions provision of the law for causing discrimination in the workplace. Rather than risk violating the law’s complicated requirements, employers often avoid hiring anyone who looks or sounds foreign, even though the applicant is, in fact, entitled to work in the United States, several recent studies have shown.

Now, employers too are joining the chorus of critics, giving birth to an uncommon alliance of business leaders and civil rights activists who are calling for an end to the sanctions.

The INS defends the sanctions, saying they are working well in discouraging the illegal flow of immigrants into the United States by making it harder for them to obtain jobs.

But many employers complain they are caught between the threat of discrimination lawsuits on one side if they dismiss or refuse to hire a worker suspected of being an illegal immigrant, and, on the other side, the threat of stiff penalties if they hire immigrants who turn out to be illegal.

“Employers get stuck between a rock and hard place,” said Jill Scheldrup, an employee relations manager with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “They are damned if they hire and damned if they fire.”

Members of the Chamber were meeting this week with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union to devise a common strategy to fight sanctions, Scheldrup said.

Opponents of sanctions hope to use a report issued Thursday by the General Accounting Office to buttress their efforts to have the law repealed.

The GAO found that penalties against employers who hire illegal aliens resulted in “widespread discrimination” against legal American residents. The report also found that discrimination related to the law “is serious but not pervasive.”

Bias might be reduced, the GAO said, if employers were given more information about the law’s requirements.

The INS maintains the rules are much easier to follow than some employers would suggest. As evidence, they point to a high compliance rate: In a seven-county area that includes Los Angeles, approximately 72% of employers whose firms or businesses have been inspected by immigration agents are complying with the law.

“Fines are basically a last resort,” INS spokeswoman Carol Bara said. “A lot of steps are involved” before a fine is levied--including educational visits by INS agents to the workplace and an inspection of an employer’s personnel files with time given to correct any errors that are detected.

Between the end of 1987, when the sanctions went into effect, and last month, the INS made 584,853 educational visits to employers in California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii and Guam, Bara said.

The INS has also supplied employers with a handbook that outlines their responsibilities, as well as workers’ rights, and a toll-free telephone number was set up for employers who have questions, she said.

Within reason, employers do not have to verify the authenticity of the documents that a worker offers as proof, and all sides concede that expertly executed counterfeit identification cards have flooded the market since the immigration law went into effect. But the task is complicated by a myriad of documents that are legitimate and acceptable, including no fewer than 17 versions of the so-called “green card,” or alien work permit.

Fines can range from $100 for a minor paperwork infraction to over $10,000 for repeatedly hiring an illegal alien. But in numerous cases, the fines are relatively small and, consequently, many employers are more willing to pay the money than take on an expensive legal battle.

But on a rare occasion, an employer, like Bell, will fight back.

“If you are dispassionate about it, you pay,” said the 50-year-old businessman. “But it brands you as a person who hires illegals. It puts you on a ‘bad’ list. And that’s a place you don’t want to be.”

Bell’s company designs and makes specialized packaging for delicate electronics or other sensitive equipment. It operates out of a red-brick building that sits only yards from the main railroad track that runs from San Diego to Los Angeles.

Bell’s troubles began in the spring of 1988. The grace period that the INS had given before agents were to begin enforcing the sanctions was ending. He called his estimated 50 employees together to inform them that anyone hired after Nov. 6, 1986, had to be able to prove he or she was entitled to work in the United States.

About 30 of Bell’s employees are Latino, and most had already applied for amnesty, he said. As a participant in the amnesty program, a non-U.S. citizen is entitled to work here.

Two employees were not eligible for amnesty but hired a lawyer in an effort to obtain a special labor certification permit, Bell said. This permit is issued when an employer can demonstrate that the work performed by the employee requires special skills, and the employer can show that no other legal workers are available to perform the same task.

The application for the two men was approved by the Labor Department and submitted to the INS, Bell said. What Bell says he did not know was that a worker awaiting this form of authorization must do the waiting in his or her home country.

So on April 24 of last year, INS agents swept into Bell’s factory, slapped handcuffs on one of the men and carted him away, Bell said. Bell was hit with a $1,000 fine for knowingly continuing to employ an illegal alien.

The second man quickly slipped back to Mexico.

INS attorneys, while declining to discuss the case in detail, said Bell clearly should have known the man awaiting the labor authorization did not have permission to work in this country.

Meanwhile, Bell was hit with three more fines, totaling $600, for what he characterizes as paperwork violations. After the INS paid its education visit to Bell’s factory in March of last year, he gathered up his employees’ documents and, with his wife, Angeline, filled out registration forms for each worker hired after Nov. 6, 1986. But inspectors found problems with three forms.

Bell refused to settle, and the federal government is now taking him to court. He is scheduled to go on trial before an administrative judge May 1.

It is highly unusual for these cases to reach that level: Only three trials were held last year in the seven-county Los Angeles District, an INS spokesman said.

“It’s a matter of principle,” Bell said.

Though the INS says the immigration law is not difficult to obey, those who counsel employers say many bosses remain confused and intimidated by the legal procedures and the paperwork. Even those who are fined sometimes don’t understand what they did wrong, say these observers.

“The questions I was getting from employers the last five months were not any different from the questions I heard at the start” of the sanctions, said Nancy Cowen, staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who held more than 40 immigration-law workshops for employers during the last 18 months.

Some companies go overboard, supplying too much evidence that employees are eligible to work. One medical firm even turned in its nurses’ licenses, Cowen said. A landscaping firm in Sacramento, after being questioned by INS agents repeatedly regarding its Latino employees, decided not to hire any more Latinos, Cowen said.

The INS employers’ handbook contains samples of many--but not all--documents that legitimately entitle a person to work. Job-seekers who present documents not contained in the handbook, such as work-authorization papers for political refugee applicants, are often turned away unjustly, Cowen said.

“Many employers are unsure, so they are erring on the side of conservatism,” said J. Fong, legal director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. “They will simply not employ (an applicant) if they have any doubts at all” about the applicant’s eligibility.

Josie Gonzalez, an attorney who chairs the national employer-sanctions committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said employers find it costly and cumbersome to comply with the law. It puts a burden on employers that many advocates say best belongs left on immigration agents.

Scheldrup, the Chamber of Commerce executive, said: “Employers should not be policemen.”