Issue of Hiring Illegal Immigrants Hits Home : O.C. jobs: An abundance of phony documents and the desperation of those seeking work worsen dilemma.

The stack of allegedly fake immigration “green cards,” temporary resident cards, Social Security cards, and California and Mexican birth certificates amazed even federal agents last week when they arrested a Santa Ana man and charged him with forging more than 30,000 identification papers.

It was the largest counterfeiting case of its kind in Orange County, coming only a week after agents in an unrelated raid arrested 233 workers at a Vans athletic shoe manufacturing plant in Orange. And it happened the same week the U.S. Senate wrestled with immigration issues before Zoe Baird withdrew herself from consideration as U.S. attorney general.

From the halls of Congress to homes and factories in Orange County, the nation’s immigration policy once again is playing itself out in headlines and in personal dilemmas.

“The way people view the whole spectrum of illegal immigration has been raised to a new level,” said John Brechtel, assistant director for investigations at the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s regional office in Los Angeles. The Zoe Baird case “certainly has raised the conscience of most people. Everyone knows about it, and they know it is illegal.”

Zoe Baird’s account of hiring two Peruvian domestics, and her failure to pay their Social Security taxes, has struck a chord in the homes of many Orange County residents who hire domestic help, according to agencies that place housekeepers and nannies.

The agencies say that they instruct their clients on all the fine points of taxes and immigration law, but some follow the rules and some don’t. Either way, they say, the Baird issue was closely watched last week.

“There are agencies out there that don’t ask to see” the documentation, said George Miller, president of Active Domestic Personnel Service in Lake Forest. “For us, that’s the first thing we ask. But you take the documents at face value. I’m not the INS and I’m not the IRS.”

Yet, who makes the problem worse: the employee or their employer?

“I’ll bet that half, if not all those senators (involved in the Baird hearing) had undocumented workers doing something for them: child care, mowing their lawns, cleaning their sheets when they travel,” said Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. “The drive to survive when you’re desperate surpasses your drive to comply with laws. I have empathy for people in those desperate straits.”

Some operators of domestic agencies say that even when employees have legitimate documentation, they cannot guarantee that their employers will pay Social Security taxes on their behalf or follow other labor laws.

“You would be surprised how many employers take advantage of the women,” said Lily Ulivi, who runs an employment agency in Orange for nannies and maids. “Some of them try to get the women to work 15 hours (per day) for just $100” per week.

If she tries to stop the practice, a client will just go to another agency to look for help, Ulivi said. And the employees themselves are willing to accept wages below the minimum wage because they need the work.

Her husband, Rick Ulivi, has been frustrated that all of the attention was on Baird’s hiring of an illegal worker, rather than on her failure to comply with an employer’s other responsibilities.

“It’s appalling what people are doing,” he said. “They will hire and then will pay below minimum wage, or pay in cash, or won’t pay for sick days. It’s like they say, ‘We want to hire some domestic help, and all the rules are suspended.’ These people who hire are professionals--lawyers, doctors--who would turn around and sue in a minute if they were treated the same way.”

The INS’ regional office in Los Angeles, which covers much of Southern California, has tried to shut down networks that smuggle illegal immigrants into this country to serve as domestic help, Brechtel said. However, making a connection between the employers and the smugglers has been difficult, he said.

“It’s being done, but it is very hard to make that connection,” he said.

Ironically, while it was Baird’s case that made national news, the INS has difficulty making individual cases regarding the hiring of illegal immigrants a priority. The agency just doesn’t have the resources, Brechtel said.

Rather, it attempts to crack down on abuses at workplaces where several hundred illegal immigrants may be employed.

“We’re going into companies like Vans, where a major portion of their work force will have illegal documentation,” he said. Although he denied that the INS has stepped up its enforcement efforts, Brechtel said that more raids can be expected.

Vans officials--who lost a tenth of their work force in the Jan. 14 raid--say that they had no knowledge that they had hired workers illegally, mainly because those workers--who have since been deported--provided bogus identification cards or INS forms. The difficulty, the company says, is spotting fake immigration papers.

“We’re not the CIA, we just make tennis shoes here,” Vans President Richard P. Leeuwenburg, adding that the forged documents “are out there, but you have to have an expert to spot it. But we did not knowingly hire illegals. We would very much like to have the help to guard against it.”

While many employers have gone to seminars and have consulted with labor lawyers on how to spot fake identification cards, companies must guard against falsely accusing an applicant of providing bogus records.

“They can get sued for discrimination,” said Gene Fredricks, a labor relations consultant and member of the board of directors of the Orange County Employers Advisory Council. “They subject themselves to a lawsuit. It’s a Catch-22.”

For its part, the INS has tried to make its documentation more sophisticated and more difficult to counterfeit, Brechtel said. However, even the new documents can be counterfeited and sell for $120 to $150 each, compared to a $20 to $30 price for a replica of an older document, he said. The INS also is testing a computer database for employers to verify the legitimacy of the documentation.

Yet efforts to control borders, several community activist groups say, ignore the real problem: the plight of Mexican citizens.

“The situation will not relieve itself unless the effects of financial empowerment have results,” said Amin David, Orange County director of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

“Once you relieve the pressure of people having to eat and they have jobs in Mexico, the migration will subside to a tremendous degree. . . . The magnet of being able to work to buy food is more powerful than any kind of law.”

Times staff writer David Haldane contributed to this report.