Democratic Underground - massive resistance to that

There was massive resistance to the "no match" policy nonsense - for good reason - and after being pursued by the Bush administration for a while it was abandoned.

I am in favor of issuing a work card at the border to those seeking work and for getting them into the system. Using Social Security to monitor all of us - no one should support that.

Immigration Debate: Court Puts "No-Match" Letters on Hold; First Step in Protecting Workers

Yesterday a San Francisco federal judge extended for 10 days a temporary restraining order (TRO) that blocks the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using backlogged and error-prone social security records to enforce immigration law. Before October 10, the judge will rule on whether or not to permanently stop the Social Security Administration (SSA) from sending "no match" notices to approximately 140,000 employers across the country.

The new social security "no match" regulations may be "tough" enforcement, but they're not smart enforcement. Sending out "no match" letters based on a backlogged system full of discrepancies will lead to unfair firings of legal workers, wrongful detention, and a chaotic churning of workers across industries.

The Social Security administration's own internal reports suggest that hundreds of thousands of the "no match" letters will be incorrect. That means that thousands of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents will be forced to run the Social Security Administration's bureaucratic gauntlet in order to keep their jobs. In most cases, employers aren't likely to wait out the red tape to re-verify a worker--employers will fire first and only the most well connected workers will be able to ask questions later.

This unwise, piecemeal approach will lead to chaos--not order--and untold misery for many our nation's hardest, most underpaid workers. If left unchecked, "no match" regulations will push all low-wage workers deeper into the shadows, breed division, and benefit the most unscrupulous, off-the-books employers.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/64183/

AFL-CIO v. Chertoff

AFL-CIO, ACLU and National Immigration Law Center Challenge New Homeland Security Rule

October 7, 2009

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the ACLU, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Central Labor Council of Alameda County along with other local labor movements filed a lawsuit charging that a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule will threaten jobs of U.S. citizens and other legally authorized workers simply because of errors in the government's inaccurate social security earnings databases. The rule violates workers' rights and imposes burdensome obligations on employers who receive Social Security Administration (SSA) "no-match" letters that inform an employer of alleged discrepancies between employee records and the SSA database.

Under the new rule, many U.S. citizens and legally authorized workers could be required to be terminated if their erroneous SSA records are not fixed within 90 days of an SSA "no-match" letter being sent to an employer.

http://www.aclu.org/immigrants-rights/afl-cio-v-chertoff

Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In

The Obama administration should embrace progressive tactics to protect human and workplace rights.

The Smithfield plant, the largest of its kind in the world, employs 5,000 people, about half of them immigrants. No one can say for sure how many lacked immigration papers, but as in most meatpacking plants, many undoubtedly did. Despite their status, during the previous year those workers walked out twice to join immigrants' rights marches. They even shut down production lines over the high accident rate. The fear created by the no-match check was an easy way to cut that activism short.

For the past two decades employers have threatened, and often implemented, similar terminations in workplace after workplace. At the Woodfin Suites in Emeryville, California, the hotel threatened no-match firings after workers began demanding compliance with the city's living-wage law. At the Cintas Laundry chain, plant managers fired hundreds of employees last year in no-match checks during UNITE HERE's national organizing drive. The list goes on and on.

The Bush Administration says that vastly increased checks will become a fact of life in every US workplace. On August 10, Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters that SSA would send letters to 160,000 employers on September 4, listing all workers whose numbers don't jibe. After a ninety-day grace period, the Administration will require employers to discharge those whose numbers are still in question. Those letters would list the names of millions of workers.

Implementation of the new regulation was halted on August 31, however, after unions filed suit against it. In response to a legal challenge by two Bay Area labor councils in Alameda and San Francisco Counties, the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, the national AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Law Center, US District Judge Maxine Chesney issued a temporary restraining order blocking it. The TRO stopped Social Security from sending letters on September 4.

The suit charges that the new Bush rule will threaten jobs of US citizens and legal residents because of errors in the government's database, and therefore would violate workers' rights and impose burdensome obligations on employers. According to the SSA Inspector General, 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies belong to US citizens. A series of hearings will now be held to determine whether the order should be made permanent.

The plaintiffs filed suit because of the staggering scope of Chertoff's order. About 12 million people living in the United States have no legal immigration status. Most of them work. In order to get hired, they have to present a Social Security number to their employer. Some use invented numbers, while others borrow existing numbers that belong to someone else. This causes no harm to others--if anything, it subsidizes the Social Security fund, since undocumented workers can't claim benefits, although they're paying deductions like everyone else.

Yet if the Chertoff regulation is implemented as announced, as many as 9 million people will lose their jobs at the end of this year.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:06Q9hZK3FqYJ:www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/bacon+no+match+immigrants&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

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AFL-CIO v. Chertoff

Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In