Let’s Enforce Immigration Laws

The brilliantly constructed 1986 federal Immigration Reform and Control Act is in deep trouble because of a welter of dubious political and legal challenges--along with some ludicrous local government moves that make a mockery of the law.

The source of the trouble isn’t hard to understand, and Congress can easily devise a solution if it really wants to reach the law’s goals of helping millions of illegal immigrants come up from underground while also slowing the flood of more foreigners illegally pouring into the United States.

The law, the most generous immigration law ever passed in any country, has already allowed more than 2.5 million illegal immigrants to live here permanently. To help curb the influx of millions more, Congress decided for the first time that employers who knowingly hire them would be punished by fines and even imprisonment.

Initially, the law worked beautifully. The tide of illegals receded dramatically.

In 1986, before the law went into effect, 1.6 million people were apprehended crossing the border illegally. By 1989, the number was cut by 50%, mostly because of the threat that employers who hired illegals would be severely penalized.

However, by last year, the number rose to 1.05 million. (The government estimates that at least two people enter the United States illegally for each one apprehended.)

Why the increase? Lax enforcement of the law--primarily because of the success of crooks who produce counterfeit documents to falsely show that a foreign worker is legally entitled to a job. The worker usually pays about $350 for the fraudulent papers. The papers allow employers to claim they did not “knowingly” hire an illegal alien.

To block the rampant fraud, Congress is considering legislation requiring counterfeit-resistant work authorization cards for all workers.

Such cards are badly needed to help make sure that job-seekers are here legally. They would also curb discrimination against, say, brown-skinned workers denied jobs by bigoted employers who claim they refuse to hire workers that may be illegals.

One relatively inexpensive way would be to require each state to issue drivers’ licenses like those being introduced by California, which are virtually counterfeit-proof. The cards could serve as both a driver’s license and work authorization.

Other things are needed though--such as ending the disgraceful “day laborer” programs used by Los Angeles and other cities to help employers and illegal aliens evade the immigration law and mandated worker protections.

Los Angeles, for instance, has two labor centers--in North Hollywood and Harbor City--where workers, mostly illegal immigrants, are encouraged to gather to wait for job offers. A total of eight such centers are planned in Los Angeles alone at an estimated cost of $1 million a year. Tens of thousands of workers have signed for the city’s help to get jobs and evade various laws. About 20% get jobs.

The workers are expected--not required--to ask for at least $5 an hour. But they get no health insurance or other benefits and are rarely covered by workers’ compensation, jobless benefits or Social Security.

The city provides the waiting workers with toilets, coffee, rolls and other enticements to get them to move to the labor centers. The aim is to eliminate the public nuisance often created when they solicit jobs in unsupervised areas.

Some argue that illegal immigrants don’t take jobs from resident workers because they just do dirty jobs that nobody else wants. But they do depress wages and thereby discourage poor whites, blacks and others here legally from accepting such low-paying work.

Even more telling: The labor centers issue leaflets specifically telling workers they can get not just unwanted, unskilled jobs but also skilled ones as plumbers, carpenters and experienced laborers.

Ron Kennedy, head of the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO Building Trades Council, says that even as the city encourages workers to ask for $5 an hour for skilled jobs, the unemployment rate for relatively well-paid union carpenters and laborers here legally ranges from 25% to 35%.

Latino activists, many employers and others are trying hard to wreck the immigration law by seeking repeal of the employer-sanctions provision, arguing that it isn’t effective.

Yet they themselves often encourage violations--for instance, by urging the creation of even more labor centers that help employers and illegal immigrants break the law.

The courts must make sure illegal immigrants are not abused by unscrupulous employers; a federal judge in San Francisco helped substantially with a recent ruling that undocumented workers are not excluded from protection of the nation’s civil rights laws.

Maria Blanco, the Equal Rights Advocates’ attorney who represented the worker in the San Francisco case, said the decision helps assure that undocumented workers have the same legal rights that protect all other workers.

But such sensible court decisions should not be used to evade the immigration law or be used as a ploy to try to destroy it by entangling the law in a legal morass.

The law, including employer sanctions, must not only be retained but be strengthened and honored.