Crackdown on Illegal Workers Grows

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Source: Wall Street Journal

The Obama administration plans to intensify a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants with the establishment of an audit office designed to bolster verification of company hiring records. In an interview, John Morton, chief of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, said the Employment Compliance Inspection Center would "address a need to conduct audits even of the largest employers with a very large number of employees." The office would be announced Thursday, he said.

Mr. Morton said that the center would be staffed with specialists who will pore over the I-9 employee files collected from companies targeted for audits. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2010, ICE conducted audits of more than 2,740 companies, nearly twice as many as the previous year. The agency levied a record $7 million in civil fines on businesses that employed illegal workers.

Enforcement activity during the Bush administration focused on high-profile raids in which thousands of illegal immigrants were arrested and placed in deportation proceedings. Relatively few companies and their executives were prosecuted. In contrast, the Obama administration has made employers the center of its immigration policy with "silent raids." Critics say the policy has penalized small employers while failing to target larger employers. Mr. Morton said the new center would have the "express purpose" of providing support to regional immigration offices conducting large audits. "We wouldn't be limited by the size of a company," he said.

Mr. Morton said ICE was also seeking to expand a program enabling businesses to work with the federal government to ensure they are employing people authorized to work in the U.S. Called IMAGE, or ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers, the voluntary program includes training and assessments to help a company guard against hiring illegal employees. Mr. Morton will also announce Thursday that Tyson Foods, Inc., which employs 100,000 people and has fought immigration troubles in the past, has joined the program, agreeing to an audit of "a certain portion of existing records." The poultry processor, which says it has already taken steps to maintain a legal workforce, also agreed to establish an internal auditing process, Mr. Morton said.

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