RI Immigration Attorney Rui P. Alves found this article regarding the current surge of Immigration reform and the eventual part these new guidelines will play in closing businesses across the country as workers are determined to be illegally in the country and are deported from the US.
With the least insight of all, the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) department is sweeping through agricultural businesses imposing fines and firing employees, and causing hardship, destruction of lives, and the possibility of food production and supply issues in the future.
The full article follows below.
Special report: Aggressive crackdowns on illegal immigration can backfire if they hurt business
Lesson learned: Don't upset business
By CHRIS COLLINS
The Fresno Bee
Brian Poulsen fought on the front lines of America's war against illegal immigration for three decades. He patrolled the border near San Diego on horseback, grew a ragged beard to disguise himself as a human smuggler, arrested and deported thousands of illegal immigrants, and tracked down fake document vendors at local flea markets.
His job description was clear: Do everything you can to stop illegal immigrants from coming and kick them out if they get here.
But Poulsen and other agents have discovered it's not easy to enforce immigration laws -- especially those that target employers.
Aggressive crackdowns can backfire if they hurt business. A sweep of Midwestern meatpacking plants in the late 1990s, for example, prompted outrage from business and civic leaders. Immigration officials have learned to tread lightly.
Poulsen, who retired this year as the top immigration enforcement official in the central San Joaquin Valley, tried to strike a balance between stopping illegal immigration and protecting farmers' interests. His office rarely conducted audits, never issued a fine and avoided messy, high-profile raids that would permanently shut down a business and separate families.
"There's a little bit of a tightrope. I understand where the farmers are coming from," said Poulsen, who grew up harvesting potatoes in Idaho. "You don't want to see people go out of business, but at the same time, we're sworn to do a job and can't look the other way."
Things may be changing: The Obama administration has stepped up the pace of audits, which are less likely to spark a backlash than workplace raids. For example, of 16 audits conducted in the central San Joaquin Valley over the past eight years, 11 have come since late 2008.
Some agriculture leaders in the Valley are worried about the audits, which can hurt businesses by making them fire all their illegal workers.
But government figures show that the new effort is tame compared to the early 1990s, when immigration officials fined about 900 companies a year and audited thousands. This year, they fined 237.
Many experts say aggressively cracking down on employers will rid the nation of illegal immigrants. Because the vast majority of them come here to work, America would be a much less appealing destination without job opportunities.
But advocates for stricter enforcement say there is little political appetite to sever the co-dependent relationship between businesses and illegal immigrants.
And aggressive enforcement, agents have learned, can backfire.
In the late 1990s, in response to calls for tougher enforcement, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service -- which later became Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- blanketed Midwestern meat-packing companies with audits that identified thousands of employees suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Frightened workers left in droves, slowing slaughter-line speeds to a crawl and hurting farmers who relied on the meat-packing businesses.
"All hell broke loose," said Mark Reed, a former top INS official who was in charge of the crackdown, dubbed Operation Vanguard. "All of a sudden, these communities that wanted these people out of there realized that they needed them.
They didn't realize that the kids who played on their soccer teams and the people they went to church with were going to go. They didn't realize that they were the center of their economy." Nebraska's governor and members of Congress intervened. Operation Vanguard -- which was scheduled to expand to the rest of the country -- was nipped in the bud.
During the waning years of the Bush administration, immigration agents grabbed headlines by raiding companies and deporting workers. The raids across the country drew controversy, just as Operation Vanguard did a decade earlier.
The Obama administration decided to take a different approach.
In April 2009, ICE issued a memo that downplayed the importance of raids, noting that they did little to prove that employers knowingly hired illegal immigrants.
Instead, it hired scores of auditors and directed them to build cases against businesses. If an audit shows that a business employed illegal immigrants, the owner must fire them to avoid fines of up to $3,200 for each illegal worker -- or prison time.
In 2006, ICE spent just 2 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement, and not a single company was fined for hiring illegal immigrants. This year, it audited 2,196 businesses and fined 237.
Still, ICE spent only about 5 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement through April -- less than a fourth of the time it spent on drug smuggling.
Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, an association of agriculture businesses in the Western U.S., said ICE audited four growers in his association last year, forcing them to fire many of their workers. He described it as a farmer's "worst nightmare." "It was like Satan came to their door and said, 'We're taking your children because you know what? Your children sinned,'" Cunha said. "These farmers knew these workers. They were part of their community. They were part of their families. You yank them out, what does that do to that industry? To those farmers? To those workers?"
Mike Saqui, a Sacramento immigration attorney for businesses, said an audit can be destructive for businesses. One client who was audited in the middle of harvest-time last year had to fire 269 of his 280 field workers.
If ICE wanted to use audits to get agriculture employers' attention, it worked. Cunha said growers worry about audits "every day now." Yet some doubt the administration's audit strategy will succeed.
Reed, the former INS official who now runs an immigration consultant firm in Tucson, Ariz., said ICE should take a more comprehensive strategy and audit all companies in a region in the same industry instead of its current "hodgepodge" approach. Otherwise, he said, businesses will continue to hire illegal immigrants because they believe there's little risk of an audit.
Philip Martin, an immigration and farm labor expert at the University of California, Davis, said another question is whether the administration will follow its strategy consistently.
"So far, it hasn't been sustained long enough for it to have a significant effect," he said. "That's the big question: Is it going to be sustained?" Audits aren't the only thing employers are worried about. Immigration officials are deporting illegal immigrants -- many of them working for farmers or construction companies -- at a record pace. In the 2009-10 fiscal year, they deported 393,000 -- almost twice as many as four years earlier.
Much of the focus has been on deporting illegal immigrants suspected or convicted of crimes. But others often are swept up in such efforts.
That is what happened in Mendota during a February 2007 raid that was criticized by some local officials. Mendota officials said it took residents about a year to recover and the local economy suffered. Former Fresno mayor Alan Autry criticized ICE for being "mind-boggling in its callousness." Erik Bonnar, the deputy field office director who supervises deportations in the San Joaquin Valley, said agents couldn't ignore the fact that some residents were illegal immigrants.
"If our officers determine that they're here illegally, then they'll take them into custody," he said.
More recently, ICE started a program in 2007 called Secure Communities that has attracted growing attention. It uses fingerprints to determine whether jail inmates are illegal immigrants, which often leads to their deportation.
Fresno, Tulare and Merced counties joined the rapidly expanding program this year. Because of jail overcrowding, however, many illegal immigrants arrested for misdemeanor crimes are not booked in jail.
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If you have questions about this posting or are interested in Divorce, Immigration, or Estate Law in RI or MA contact Massachusetts and Rhode Island Divorce Lawyer Rui P. Alves at 401-942-3100 or CONTACT him via email.
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