Immigration battle: Time to speak up
CNN, November 27th, 2007
Small business owners will have an opportunity to sound off about
"no match" immigration rules that force employers to face heavy fines
for not verifying workers' immigration status within 90 days if social
security numbers didn't match.
On Friday, Federal Judge Charles
Breyer agreed with a complaint that the Department of Homeland Security
had not considered how onerous the rules are for businesses, and gave
the DHS until March 24, 2008, to survey small business owners and get
their take on how the illegal immigration rules affects them.
An
odd coalition of lobbying groups from the American Civil Liberties
Union to the Chamber of Commerce brought the issue to court by
challenging the crackdown, saying that DHS rules placed too high a
burden on businesses, and on Oct. 10 Breyer suspended those rules.
In his four-page ruling, he found the Social Security Administration
database had so many errors that thousands of American citizens and
legal immigrants would have been fired. Small businesses are more
likely to fire workers because they often lack the resources to go
through the complicated verification process.
Since August the
SSA has sent companies 141,000 "no match" letters covering 8 million
workers. The letters were giving businesses instructions on how to
handle the issue. In his October ruling, Breyer also halted those
letters saying that the government did not follow proper procedures in
implementing the rules.
The groups that filed the suit won't be happy until the department drops the rules all together.
"The
DHS is continuing down this disastrous path of punishing citizens and
legal workers by using the fatally-flawed database," said Lucas
Guttentag, Director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project in a
statement. "The DHS should finally abandon this illegal approach
instead of repeating the same mistake."
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