7 Years Later, Many Scoff at Immigration Act

Since slipping into this country illegally from Guatemala four years ago, Maria C. estimates that she has worked for 40 garment sewing shops in Los Angeles.

But more than three-quarters of the time, employers never asked for papers verifying her identity and right to work in the United States--despite a sweeping 1986 immigration bill requiring them to check papers or face stiff penalties.

Her story is hardly unique. A chorus of experts says that brazen violations by scofflaw employers and document counterfeiters have undermined the nation’s efforts to control immigration under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA.

Sensing growing public frustration over illegal immigration, politicians are clamoring for new measures to curb the flow. Gov. Pete Wilson has called for severe restrictions, among them denying illegals immigrants medical treatment and education, refusing citizenship to their U.S.-born children--and, on Tuesday, suggesting that illegals immigrants be barred from obtaining California driver’s licenses.

But the advocates of new controls largely have been silent about U.S. companies’ flouting of the law that promised to stem illegal entry.

Immigration officials say the vast majority of employers comply with the law. They acknowledge, however, that legal loopholes and the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s thin investigative ranks have dulled the law’s edge as jobs continue to draw illegal immigrants to the United States.

In two industries that authorities consider the biggest violators in Los Angeles and Orange counties--construction and garment manufacturing--about 80% of employers break immigration regulations, according to John Brechtel, who is in charge of investigations for the INS’s Los Angeles office.

For illegal immigrants in those businesses, job hunting goes on much as it did nearly seven years ago, when employers were barred from knowingly hiring undocumented workers.

“I only ask if they have work, and they say ‘yes,’ and that’s it. . . . I just start working,” said Maria, who spoke through an interpreter and asked that her last name not be published because of her immigration status.

Some employers have complained bitterly about being turned into immigration cops, and civil rights groups warn that the Immigration Reform and Control Act invites broad-based discrimination against people who look or sound foreign.

But even among employers who--as the act requires--ask all new hires for U.S. work authorization and identification papers, many accept counterfeit documents with a wink.

“It’s become a standard joke. They say, ‘Just give me something so I can say I complied with the law,’ ” said Jesse Martinez, financial secretary for United Brotherhood of Carpenters Local 309 in El Monte.

INS officials say the bulk of employers in most industries are following the letter and spirit of the law. Nationally, compliance rates among employers have risen steadily in the years since the law was passed, reaching 89% in 1992, the INS says.

Brechtel said the agency’s experience has been similar in Southern California, notwithstanding the abnormally high number of violations in the garment and construction trades. “Overall, we’re seeing very high compliance,” he said.

Joseph Rodriguez, executive director of the Garment Contractors Assn. of Southern California, concedes that counterfeit documents remain a loophole. Unlike some others in the garment industry, however, Rodriguez maintains that “the blatant practice of hiring people without documentation is yesterday’s practice. It’s just not done as much as it was. . . .

“People are really scared of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” he said. “The feeling is, ‘Don’t mess with them, they’re nasty people.’ ”

Other employers complain about record-keeping requirements and INS fines for simple paperwork errors. They cite Disneyland, which this year was assessed nearly $400,000 in fines. Brechtel conceded that the INS found no evidence that the theme park knowingly hired any undocumented workers, but said its paperwork violations were egregious.

Disneyland, which is appealing the case, declined to comment. But Angela Keefe, head of the hotel and restaurant workers’ union local representing many Disneyland workers, said the park was “unfairly dinged. I think the INS wanted to send out a wave of fear.”

Still, researchers say, enough firms have kept hiring undocumented workers to trample the immigration law. “We all agree it isn’t working. The data are quite clear,” said Elizabeth Rolph, an immigration expert at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica.

While many elected officials’ proposals for immigration reform focus on beefing up enforcement at the border--or denying public services to illegal immigrants--experts say properly implemented and enforced employer sanctions probably would work best. Why? They would eliminate the underlying reason illegals come here: jobs.

To be sure, the new focus on immigration reform comes despite a growing body of research challenging the notion that immigrants are hurting California’s economy.

Some experts also argue that stiffer enforcement of employer sanctions will prompt more job discrimination against workers who look or sound foreign, a phenomenon already documented as a major problem in government and private studies.

Aiming enforcement at employers is “more trouble than it’s worth,” said Michael Fix, director of the immigrant policy program at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

For that reason, immigrant and minority rights groups have teamed up in an unusual political alliance with business groups to hamstring employer sanctions. (The tension surrounding the issue was evident Wednesday as the California Legislature’s Latino caucus split over a bill that would allow the state to seize the assets of employers who repeatedly hired illegal immigrants.)

When the immigration law was passed in November, 1986, “there was strong ambivalence in Congress regarding enforcement of employer sanctions, and that ambivalence is reflected in the legislation,” Rolph said.

Critics fault Congress, among other things, for allowing workers to use easily counterfeited documents such as Social Security cards and old-fashioned green cards to satisfy their pre-employment identification requirements. The result, they say, was a cottage industry in counterfeit documents.

“If you want a Social Security card, you go to a swap meet” to buy one, Martinez said.

Instead, Rolph said, Congress should require that all workers present a tamper-proof, national identification card before starting a new job. Although long opposed as a potential infringement on personal privacy, national identity cards have gained supporters lately, and the concept is being considered by the Clinton Administration.

The immigration law also contains a provision that protects employers who make a good faith effort to determine if a new hire is eligible to work in this country. Because of the difficulty of proving an employer’s intent, some who are caught with undocumented workers on the payroll escape penalties.

And although the law carries criminal charges for repeat offenders, no employer has ever received a jail term under Immigration Reform Act. From November, 1988, when full enforcement of employer sanctions began, through last October, the INS extracted had $23.4 million in civil fines.

In any event, the INS has been plagued by skimpy resources in trying to police employers, according to Rolph. The agency has a crew of 30 investigators to police all of the estimated 215,000 business establishments in Los Angeles County. The garment industry alone has nearly 5,000 employers, including an estimated 1,000 firms that operate illegally in the underground economy.

“You do the best you can with the resources you’ve got,” Brechtel said.

And the INS gets little or no help from other government authorities, including two agencies that have a much greater presence in the workplace--the U.S. Department of Labor and the California Department of Industrial Relations.

In fact, the state agency intentionally avoids investigating possible immigration violations because it does not want to deter illegal immigrants from reporting such problems as minimum wage and overtime pay abuses, said John Duncan, spokesman for the state agency.

If the agency scrapped that policy, Duncan said, it would give employers even more incentive to hire undocumented workers, because the illegals would have no legal recourse.

Indeed, many employers--even in the closely scrutinized garment trade--say they rarely see a regulator. Garment-manufacturing contractor Robert M. Walter says he tries his best to make sure his new hires aren’t illegals simply because it is “the right thing to do.”

Fear of the authorities, he said, plays only a small role in his thinking.

“I haven’t heard about anyone (being inspected) in a year,” Walter said. “It makes me wonder--are they hitting on people I’m not familiar with? Or are they concentrating on other industries?”

Times staff writer Chris Woodyard in Orange County contributed to this story.