The Rest of the Pelosi Story

[Rick Oltman]

The news media and other news disseminators, FOX, CNN, Drudge and even Rush Limbaugh gave a considerable amount of coverage to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently when she was caught on tape telling illegal aliens that they were “very, very patriotic” for “…taking responsibility for our country’s future.” That it was “un-American” to enforce our employment and immigration laws. And for good measure, that their illegal entry into our country has, “made America more American.”

In an unscripted revelation, we heard what Madam Speaker actually thinks and how she thinks: “There are ways it (the raids) can stop, by just changing policy by the administration, which I think will happen.” And as sensational as this candid moment was there is more to it than these few troubling spontaneous remarks.

With a respectful nod to the late Paul Harvey, here is the rest of the story.

Pelosi’s comments are just part of an ongoing assault on the American worker which didn’t begin with her. There has been a series of events that shows contempt for American workers and America's immigration and employment laws.

We are all aware of the tremendous number of jobs that have been shipped off-shore in the past decade and a half as a result of the global economy. Obviously that makes the jobs that remain even more important to American workers.

Now the technology for identifying legal workers is available so that every employer in the country can simply and accurately verify that a job applicant is actually legally eligible to work in the United States. Two processes, E-Verify and the No-Match letters, one voluntary the other proactive, exist to help employers identify work eligibility for American workers (defined here as American citizens or legal immigrants with a work visa.)

E-Verify
E-Verify began as the Basic Pilot Program in 1997 as a voluntary federal program where employers can check the work eligibility status of new hires online by comparing information from the employee against the Social Security Administration database. The program was authorized for five years and renewed until November 2008. It was recently extended for only 6 months and will expire in September. Initially it had a 10% error rate which has since been reduced to 0.5%, half of one percent. Over 100,000 American employers have used E-Verify. But, E-Verify is neither permanent nor mandatory. It should be both, especially for government employees, local and federal. But it is not. Why? Because it works. And because it does work, it would identify illegal alien workers who could then be replaced by American workers. At the very least, government employees paid with our tax dollars should be American workers.

In June of 2008 President Bush signed Executive Order 13465 that required all Federal contractors and their sub contractors to use E-Verify to confirm that all of their new hires and their current employers working directly on federal contracts are authorized to legally work in the United States.

In December of 2008 a lawsuit was filed against DHS in federal court by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc., Society for Human Resource Management; American Council on International Personnel, and HR Policy Association. They asked the court to declare Executive Order 13,465 illegal and void, permanently enjoin anyone from enforcing the requirements imposed by the Executive Order and, of course, to award plaintiffs their costs and attorneys’ fees. The court hasn’t ruled yet. And, the federal government agreed to a request by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to postpone the implementation of E-Verify until May 21, 2009 at the earliest.

Not exactly looking out for American workers.

No-Match Letters
In 2007 the Social Security Administration had a problem. Employers withholding FICA taxes were paying the money to the government as they should, but SSA couldn’t match up over 8 million Social Security numbers with the names and wanted to inform the employers of the discrepancies. Hence, the “no-match letters” were conceived.

Again, there are honest errors in the Social Security database. They are mostly mistakes made by employees or employers who transpose numbers or women who have married and failed to report their name change to the SSA.

Over 148,000 letters reporting over 8 million “no-matches” were prepared to be sent to employers. But, not so fast. Since letters from DHS and SSA to businesses about the problem would result in the employers calling in the employee in to resolve the discrepancy, it would be immediately obvious that illegal alien workers would have no explanation for the mis-match and could then be discharged.

Accordingly, another group of end-users of illegal alien workers, in this case unions, sprang into action and filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court in San Francisco to halt the process. The plaintiffs were: The AFL-CIO, the San Francisco Labor Council, the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council and the Central Labor Council of Alameda County. They were represented by the usual open border suspects; the National Immigration Law Center, and a half a dozen attorneys from ACLU offices in San Francisco and New York City.

It was argued that the plaintiffs would suffer “irreparable harm” if employers were notified of the mis-matches. Now, what harm would that be? Nobody gets the death penalty for a social security number foul up. Nobody gets automatically fired. All that happens is that the employer calls down and asks the employee to review the number to be sure it is correct and then files the withholding under the correct number. If the error is an honest mistake it can be explained and fixed and that is the end of the problem. However, if the mismatch is caused because the number was stolen or simply made up, there’s another explanation. What the lawsuit sought to prevent was the identifying of ineligible workers who were illegal aliens.

What was the “irreparable harm” that the plaintiffs would suffer? They would lose millions of dues paying union members who would lose the jobs that they were illegally working at, of course. The result of the lawsuit was a preliminary injunction preventing the mailing of the letters. The federal government’s reply was due on February 9, 2009. In order to give the incoming Obama Administration an opportunity to review the No-Match Rule, the due date for the government’s brief is now April 10, 2009. So, we will see just how committed the government is to using its own data base to protect American workers. Can this administration make a case that the courts will accept? We’ll know soon enough.

Enforcement Curtailed
And then there is this from February 25th, the first indication of the new administration’s view of worksite enforcement.

SEATTLE (AP) — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has ordered a review of a raid at a Washington manufacturing plant that ended with the arrests of 28 illegal immigrants.

Homeland Security spokesman Sean Smith says Napolitano wants to know why Tuesday's raid occurred and what led up to it.

President Barack Obama, who appointed Napolitano, has signaled for a shift in immigration policy that would rely less on work site enforcement, focusing instead on employers who hire illegal immigrants and overall immigration reform.

Smith says the raid at the Yamato Engine Specialists in Bellingham was the first work site action that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has taken since Obama took office.

ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers in Seattle declined comment.

It sounds benign enough to order “a review.” It is equally reasonable to want to know, “why (the) raid occurred.” But that is bureaucratic code-speak and everyone in government knows it. By the end of roll call the next morning every ICE officer in Seattle and everywhere else knew exactly what it meant; a career ender if you do it again.

Also, just how the new administration is going to focus on “employers who hire illegal immigrants” while relying “less on work site enforcement” is going to be a neat trick. The thought does occur that if you don’t want ICE officers visiting the worksite, you could just mail them the no-match letters. Anecdotally, after the enforcement action and the illegal aliens don’t return to work, Americans line up for the jobs and wages tend to rise.

There is ample history of what happens to immigration officers whose work displeases their bosses. Ramos and Compean come to mind. In one case during the Clinton Administration the Chief Enforcement Officer of the INS Western District in San Francisco was told by his boss that he was “too enforcement minded” and given a new office without windows or a telephone. This was the traditional way of saying you’re on the way out. The officer, who was enforcement minded and loved America and the rule of law, got fed up and retired, which was the desired goal.

As unemployment continues to rise, (8% in the country and over 10% in the western states) the need for employment law enforcement is more important than ever, that is if you care about the American worker more than corporate profits. The evidence thus far seems to indicate that bureaucrats and elected officials in this government do not support American workers and in fact work against them, protecting illegal alien workers by curtailing legitimate employment enforcement.

Of course, the ultimate goal of all of this lack of enforcement is a defacto amnesty for illegal aliens.

As we can see, as the rule of law dies the death of a thousand cuts in America, this most recent Pelosi proclamation is just one more stab in the back of the American worker.

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