Help Wanted as Immigration Faces Overhaul

Brett McMahon of Miller & Long, left, discusses immigration issues with engineer Ivan Perez. Perez has been in the United States for six years. (By Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)

Businesses say they already patrol job applications to sift out counterfeit documents. At least four out of 10 applicants for jobs at Harry's Essential Grille in Vienna present work documents that look like frauds, such as Social Security cards that feel too thin, said Jason Steward, manager of the restaurant.

"You have a gut feeling," Steward said. The company he works for, Essential Restaurant Holdings LLC, has hired 200 people since opening its two Northern Virginia restaurants 2 1/2 years ago. About half of its workers are immigrants. He does not object to checking a Social Security number in a national database. But he worries about being the first line of defense for the company. If he messes up, Essential Restaurants could be fined or face criminal penalties under some of the proposals before Congress.

Brett McMahon, vice president of Bethesda-based Miller & Long Concrete Construction Co., one of the biggest concrete contractors in the country, with $300 million in annual revenue, said his concern is that the legislation would essentially turn his company into "an enforcer of who's legal and who's not." McMahon said, "It's nowhere near that simple to check."

In the past 15 years, the Labor Department has audited McMahon's company five times looking for illegal workers -- each time finding none, McMahon said. He added that the House bill threatens to bring his business to a "screeching halt" because there is no provision for a guest-worker program or for dealing with the undocumented immigrants already working.

But advocates of tighter borders say hiring foreigners should be difficult, not just for security but to limit competition between less-skilled immigrants and Americans.

"Employers in many of these sectors have gotten themselves into a Catch-22 situation where if they do not look the other way and hire illegal workers, they will not be competitive with other businesses," said Jack Martin, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an advocacy group governed by business leaders and activists favoring national immigration limits.

"The wages and working conditions where there are large numbers of illegal workers have been driven down to the point where those jobs are not as attractive to American workers," Martin said.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center data, undocumented workers tend to be clustered in service and construction jobs and make up more than half of the region's janitorial and landscape workers. Forty-three percent of the region's construction workers are illegally in the United States or have only temporary work authorization, the data show.

Wages for landscaping and groundskeeping workers in the Washington area have risen slightly in recent years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from an average of $9.61 per hour in 1999 to $10.51 in 2004. Professional Grounds' Trimmer said most employees, including guest workers, earn $9 to $11 per hour.

Construction wages in the Washington area have risen from an average of $15.86 in 1999 to $17.19 in 2004, according to the bureau. McMahon estimated that construction wages these days are even higher -- roughly $20 an hour, plus health care.

"People think construction is about hiring day laborers in a Lowe's parking lot and throwing them in a pickup and paying them $2 an hour," McMahon said.

The company has roughly 60 projects underway, including offices, hotels and condominiums, and employs about 2,800 workers in the Washington area -- three-fourths of them immigrants.