Employers feel heat on immigration

Arizona's new law imposes sanctions – the stiffest in the US – for hiring illegal workers.

from the July 5, 2007 edition

Page 3 of 3

Page 1 | Page 2 | 3

"When the future of your license depends on one system, and one system only, you can't really refute much of it," says Steve Chucri, chief executive officer of the Arizona Restaurant and Hospitality Association. "We want to work through this to help them perfect the system. But at the same time, we don't want to lose our ability to conduct business in the state because the system may or may not have rendered accurate information."

Those vagaries make it difficult for businesses. "Because of the mistake of one human-resources person who vetted an illegal employee through a flawed database, a company can lose its license," says Spencer Kamps, vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona.

The system will force businesses to spend more money to ensure they're complying with the law and on legal fees if they're charged with infractions, business experts say.

"This law has the potential for some bite to it," says Dawn McLaren, an economist at Arizona State University. "It raises the cost of doing business here" – and in a way that's not easy to determine in advance.

On a violation, an employer may avoid losing her license because she didn't "knowingly" or "intentionally" hire an undocumented worker, but she still will most likely incur legal fees in defending her actions, Ms. McLaren points out.

Napolitano has asked the state legislature to return in a special session this fall to address some of what she called "flaws" of the new measure, including the lack of protection for critical infrastructure. "Hospitals, nursing homes, and power plants could be shut down for days because of a single wrongful employment decision," she said in a statement. And "the revocation provision is overbroad and could cause a business with multiple locations to face shutdown of its entire operation based on an infraction that occurred at only one location."

1 | 2 | Page 3