DHS ID rule worries Florida industries
or name to get work. Currently, many companies ignore such letters. The rule change will give employers a period of time, likey to be sixty days, to work with employees to reconcile the inconsistencies. Otherwise, companies would have to fire employees or face stiff fines. Of the 250 million wage reports the Social Security Administration (SSA) receives nationally each year, about 10 percent belong to employees whose Social Security numbers don’t match their names.
Florida business must be thinking to themseles: First, severe hurricanes; then, Congress’ failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, which many employers hoped would expand guest-worker programs; and now this. “So many factors are conspiring to really hurt our industry… and then they’re going to add in something like this and nurseries will be closing left and right,” says Sanford Stein, president of the Miami-Dade chapter of the Florida Nursery, Growers, and Landscape Association. “It’s a despicable situation.”
On the otherside of the argument the feelings are as strong. “The No. 1 reason people come here illegally is for jobs, and if employers are able to continue to employ illegal aliens we will continue to have an influx of illegal aliens,” said Caroline Espinosa, a spokeswoman for NumbersUSA, an Arlington, Virginia-based anti-immigration nonprofit organization. “We are definitely glad the Department of Homeland Security is taking this step, because it is long overdue.”
Note that right now, the U.S. government appears to be playing both sides of the field: Under the current system, there is a presumption of innocence on the part of an employer who has received the no-match letters, said Enrique Gonzalez, who heads the Miami office for Fragomen Del Rey, one of the world’s largest corporate immigration firms: Employers who act against workers with no-match letters are subject to discrimination lawsuits not only from the workers themselves, but also from a unit of the Department of Justice which prosecutes immigration-related unfair employment actions, Gonzalez said. The rule change means that employers would be forced to act, and that means industries such as agriculture, construction and hospitality will be hit hard, Gonzalez said. “They’re not going to be able to fulfill their contracts, pick the crops, build the houses,” he said.
Critics also say such an enforcement sweep would also cause problems for the millions of U.S. citizens and legal residents who have discrepancies in their Social Security records because of name changes or clerical errors such as misspellings. “Anyone who has a complicated name is likely to be a mismatch, and Hispanics especially are going to have problems because their last names are reported differently,” said immigration lawyer Tammy Fox-Isicoff, who received no-match letters herself several years ago. “This will have a big impact.”
As we said, an essential tension.
