Senators urge better system to enforce immigration laws

A federal law barring employers from hiring illegal workers is rarely enforced, government witnesses told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Monday, as senators vowed not to repeat the mistakes of lax enforcement as they craft new immigration legislation.

An insufficient workplace-enforcement system could be the "Achilles heel" of any effort to overhaul immigration laws, said Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., during the hearing.

Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee Chairman John Cornyn, R-Texas, said the Senate did not focus enough on the workforce provisions when it debated and passed a massive immigration bill last month.

"Not a single amendment was debated or voted on during the Judiciary Committee markup, and less than an hour of Senate floor time was devoted to the issue," he said, noting that the Homeland Security Department has said that some aspects of the bill are unworkable.

Cornyn and Kyl had pushed the Senate to adopt an immigration measure that focused more on border security than the one the chamber passed. The immigration bills are now in limbo, as procedural hurdles have delayed the start of a conference on the House and Senate versions.

Enforcement efforts at the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in the Homeland Security Department have declined in recent years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released at the hearing.

In 1999, 417 employers received notices of intent to fine for hiring illegal workers, but by 2004 that figure dropped to three. Worksite arrests declined from 2,849 in 1999 to 445 in 2003, the report found.

GAO concluded that workplace enforcement was a "low priority" for the INS and ICE. In 1999, INS had 240 full-time employees working on workplace enforcement, but in 2003 there were only 90 comparable agents, GAO said.

According to the GAO report, INS and ICE have found that widespread document fraud has made it difficult to enforce the law. Under current law, employers must attest that documents presented to them appear genuine, making it difficult to prove that an employer has knowingly hired an illegal worker who presented faked documents.

Both House and Senate immigration bills would require employers to use a government database to verify the legal status of their workers. The Senate bill would only require them to check new employees, while the House version requires verification of all employees.

Kyl insisted that the new law also should include a new kind of identification card that includes biometric identification so that employers could be certain that a person applying for work is who they say they are. "You cannot rely on the same type of document and expect to get different results," he said.

But such cards would be expensive. Martin Gerry, the deputy commissioner for disability and income security programs at the Social Security Administration, told the panel that a card with enhanced security features would cost significantly more than previously estimated.

Last year, the SSA said such cards would cost $25 each, and that re-issuing new cards would cost $9.5 billion. Since then, the cost has gone up due to "new requirements for additional verification of evidence," Gerry said.

The electronic verification system included in both House and Senate bills might encounter problems, GAO predicted. It is based on the existing voluntary "Basic Pilot" program in which about 4,300 employers participate.

That program does not help combat fraud, might result in delays and might need more resources if it were to become mandatory. "Current ... staff may not be able to complete timely secondary verifications if the number of employers using the program significantly increased," according to the report.