US authorities hold tougher line on hiring illegal immigrants

Criminal arrests, often of executives, quadrupled in a year. But is it a tactic to pass a guest-worker program?

By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 20, 2007 edition

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ATLANTA - No, Ana Figueroa told the young seamstress, who was posing as a recent immigrant from Mexico. Without papers, she couldn't work at the plant.

A beat passed. Then Ms. Figueroa, who screened employees at Michael Bianco Inc. (MBI), told her to see "Felix" on the factory floor. He would get her papers for $60.

"Usted no oyó eso de mí," she added. ("You didn't hear that from me.") A few days later, the seamstress, who happened to be an undercover informant wearing a microphone, found herself at a sewing machine, stitching survival vests for the US military.

That chain of events, described in a federal affidavit, led to a high-profile immigration-enforcement raid in New Bedford, Mass., two weeks ago. While media accounts focused on the firm's immigrant workers, many of them mothers with young children, the company's owner and three other officials, including Figueroa, were also arrested and now face federal charges with prison terms up to 10 years. (Figueroa's attorney, Ray O'Hara, says she was an hourly employee, not a manager: "She was told what to do, and that was it.")

The raid is part of a growing crackdown on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Historically, such charges have been all but impossible to prove because managers could always say they were unaware that workers carried false documents. Now, the federal government is playing hardball with tactics reminiscent of the war on drugs: undercover agents, hidden recording equipment, and seizures of property connected with the crime.

The goal is to go after employers in industries that draw large numbers of illegal immigrants, such as meatpacking, construction, and apparel. The raids also have a potential political payoff. By showing a willingness to crack down on illegal immigrants and their employers, the Bush administration may be hoping to convince immigration hard-liners to support a guest-worker program, political observers say.

"It's a sea change in enforcement strategy," says Jennifer Chacón, an immigration expert at the University of California at Davis.

For example: The old Immigration and Naturalization Service fined employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants. Its successor organization, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, is arresting them. That's why the number of workplace fines dropped from 417 in fiscal year 1999 to three in FY 2004, while criminal arrests – of which a sizable number involve company executives or managers – are up dramatically. In FY 2005, there were 176 arrests; a year later, there were 718. In the first three months of FY 2007, which began in October, there have been 395 criminal arrests.

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