Democrats Risk Disaster by Supporting Employer Sanctions

OAKLAND, Calif.--Having used Latino and labor votes to recapture control of the U.S. Congress, some influential Democratic Party power brokers now seem intent on attacking the very base that produced their victory.

According to the William Velasquez Institute, seven of 10 Latino voters chose Democratic candidates. A large percentage of Latino households have family members born outside the United States, and millions of Democratic votes came from families where both documented and undocumented members live together. Union families voted for Democrats by about the same margin, seven out of 10.

Democrats cannot win elections without Latinos and labor, yet conservative party leaders propose an immigration enforcement program that targets them both.

At issue is the enforcement of employer sanctions, a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Sanctions bar employers from hiring workers who don't have proper immigration documents. They don't really penalize employers, but they do make holding a job a federal crime for an undocumented worker. Sanctions enforcement has led to the firings of thousands of immigrant workers, including many this year.

Newly appointed House Intelligence Committee head Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), a former Border Patrol agent, wants this wave of firings to grow. Behind him is the party's eminence gris, Rahm Emmanuel (D-Ill.). According to an interview earlier this year with The Hill Magazine, Emmanuel thinks it's the key to winning support among voters who view immigrants as a threat. Even some Washington, D.C., immigrant rights lobbyists advocate increased sanctions enforcement as a way of gaining Republican support.

Rahm, Reyes and their Republican colleagues say sanctions have never been enforced on employers. "There has been almost zero enforcement," Rahm told The Hill.

Rahm is wrong. When the Clinton administration mounted its highly publicized Operation Vanguard program in the meatpacking industry in 1998, over 3,000 workers were forced from their jobs, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In Washington State's apple packing sheds, over 600 people were fired in the middle of a union organizing drive the same year. Needless to say, with its leaders gone, the union lost.

That's why the AFL-CIO, in 1999, began calling for the repeal of sanctions, and for giving the undocumented legal status.

Under Bush, the firings continue. Today, most enforcement is based on letters sent to employers by the Social Security Administration, listing the names of workers whose numbers don't match its database. Although the letters caution employers not to assume that discrepancies indicate a lack of legal immigration status, thousands of workers have been terminated anyway.

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