US authorities hold tougher line on hiring illegal immigrants

"We're doing a lot of sophisticated targeting," says ICE spokeswoman Pat Reilly. "It's one thing to remove people, but the magnet [for illegals] is getting a job. If you can make that a little more risky both for the employer and the person who takes the job, then hopefully it stems the flow somewhat."

Tipped off by a company insider, ICE sent an undercover informant to an IFCO Systems plant in Guilderland, N.Y. Pretending to look for work, the informant showed an executive a green card with someone else's name and face on it. "This will probably work – it looks like you to me," the executive replied, according to a federal indictment. When the informant later came back with a batch of fake green cards, forged by ICE's own documents lab, the management asked for more and thanked him for his service to the company, the indictment says.

A follow-up ICE investigation found that managers at IFCO, a large Houston-based manufacturer of pallets and containers, recruited illegal workers in Texas and brought them to facilities across the country. The company put them up in company-owned houses and drove them to and from work. Last April, ICE conducted a multistate raid, netting more than 1,000 illegal workers at IFCO and seven current and former managers.

Last month, five of them pleaded guilty in Albany, N.Y., to federal charges of conspiracy to hire illegal workers, with each facing up to two years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

In another big case, three principals of RCI, a multimillion-dollar cleaning firm, were charged last month for tax evasion and harboring illegal aliens.

The workers were recruited at Hispanic fairs and through Spanish newspapers and were never required to fill out W-4 tax-withholding documents or I-9 employee-verification forms, according to the federal indictment. All wages were paid in cash through a variety of shell companies, prosecutors say.

The use of illegal workers "pervades many industries throughout the United States," writes John Vandevelde, a lawyer representing one of the RCI executives, in an e-mail. His client "expects to resolve this matter to everyone's satisfaction."

Spokesmen for the poultry, meat, and construction industries say that such outright scams are not the norm. Most such industries support collaborative efforts by ICE, such as the Basic Pilot program, which helps businesses double-check IDs with a Social Security database, and a new "best practices" framework, IMAGE, which provides a set of guidelines that companies can follow to ensure they don't hire illegal workers.

Still, for many industries that employ low-wage laborers, obeying current federal regulations remains a "not too hot, not too cold" enterprise, says Janet Riley, a spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute, a Washington, D.C., trade group. "If you don't screen closely enough and [papers] are falsified, then you face immigration issues. If you scrutinize too close, you face [federal] civil rights issues."

So far, the recent arrests of plant managers and executives aren't affecting hiring practices of low-wage labor, says Richard Lobb, a spokesman for the Chicken Council in Washington.

Some observers say the targeted enforcement may be a short-lived and symbolic shot aimed straight at Congress.

Though everyone "from the dog catcher to the coroner" in theory supports tougher immigration enforcement, the workplace crackdown is more likely a "dress rehearsal" for another attempt at establishing a guest-worker program, says US Rep. Tom Tancredo (R) of Colorado, a candidate for president in 2008.

The upshot? "Increasing enforcement of businesses is going to really ratchet up the lobbying pressure on senators and congressmen who get a good chunk of their campaign cash from business interests," says John Booth, political scientist at the University of North Texas in Denton. "Those who stand to benefit from a normalization of a wider labor supply from abroad are going to put some real pressure on Congress to fix this before they get their executives put in jail."

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