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June 2006 — Vol. 84, No. 5

U.S. cracking down on employers
of illegal aliens and immigration violators

 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has unveiled a comprehensive, new immigration enforcement strategy that includes expanded efforts to target employers of illegal aliens and immigration violators.

The primary objectives of the new strategy, which will complement the department’s border security efforts, are to reverse the tolerance of illegal employment and illegal immigration in the United States. The strategy involves three primary courses of action that will be carried out simultaneously:

  1. Identify and remove criminal aliens, immigration fugitives and other immigration violators from this country;

  2. Build strong work-site enforcement and compliance programs to deter illegal employment in this country; and

  3. Uproot the criminal infrastructures at home and abroad that support illegal immigration, including human smuggling/trafficking organizations and document/benefit fraud organizations.

Planned work-site enforcement, compliance activities

  • Punish knowing employers of illegal aliens. Employers that knowingly employ illegal aliens will be punished. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, has already initiated a strategic shift in the way it approaches such employers by bringing criminal charges against them and seizing their illegally derived assets — rather than relying on the old tactic of administrative fines as sanctions. Last fiscal year, this new approach resulted in 127 criminal convictions, up from 46 the previous fiscal year. More employers are also being charged with money-laundering violations, which can result in prison sentences of up to 20 years. Last year, a single ICE work-site enforcement investigation resulted in a settlement and forfeiture of $15 million, the largest work-site enforcement penalty in U.S. history and more than the sum of all administrative fines from the previous eight years.

  • Eliminate Social Security abuses that support illegal immigration. Hundreds of thousands of workers have registered “000-00-000” as a Social Security number. Millions have supplied Social Security numbers to their employers that do not match their names. This Social Security abuse provides a gateway for illegal aliens to obtain jobs. Currently, ICE does not have access to Social Security data to investigate these abuses. DHS is seeking a legislative fix in Congress that would provide ICE investigators with access to such data to combat this fraud.

  • Work with Congress to build employer compliance systems. Employers who want to stay within the law need a clear set of rules to follow. ICE and DHS will seek to develop an administrative regulatory program to provide clearer guidance to them.

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