Illegal Hiring Is Rarely Penalized

In the past few months, ICE has led several high-profile actions: against a Houston-based pallet-services company, Maryland restaurateurs and Kentucky homebuilders, among others. The activity marks a pronounced shift in emphasis, after increasing bipartisan criticism.

However, experts say the linchpin of comprehensive new enforcement plans -- developing an electronic employment-eligibility verification system to replace the paper I-9 forms used for two decades -- is years from being ready. Meanwhile, a cottage industry of document fraud and identity theft will continue, they say.

While most of the government's get-tough rhetoric has focused on people illegally crossing the border, others noted, about 40 percent of the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States entered the country legally on visas and simply stayed. That means they probably can be caught only at work.

Major work-site crackdowns have run into trouble in the past. A spring 1998 sweep that targeted the Vidalia onion harvest in Georgia, and Operation Vanguard, a 1999 clampdown on meatpacking plants in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota, provide case studies of how the government fared when confronted by a coalition that included low-wage immigrant workers and the industries that hire them, analysts said.

The Georgia raids netted 4,034 illegal immigrants, prompting other unauthorized workers to stay home. As the $90 million onion crop sat in the field, farmers "started screaming to their local representatives," said Bart Szafnicki, INS assistant district director for investigations in Atlanta from 1991 to 2001.

Georgia's two senators and three of its House members, led by then-Sen. Paul Coverdell (R) and Rep. Jack Kingston (R), complained in a letter to Washington that the INS did not understand the needs of America's farmers. The raids stopped.

For Operation Vanguard, the INS used a more sophisticated tactic. It subpoenaed personnel records from Midwestern meatpacking plants and checked them against INS and Social Security databases of authorized workers, then interviewed suspect employees. Of 24,148 employees checked, 4,495, or 19 percent, had dubious documents at about 40 plants in Nebraska, western Iowa and South Dakota. Of those workers, 70 percent disappeared rather than be interviewed. Of 1,042 questioned, 34 were arrested and deported.

Nebraska's members of Congress at first called for tougher enforcement, recalled Mark Reed, then INS director of operations. But when the result shut down some plants, "all hell broke loose," he said.

Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns (R), who was governor at the time, appointed a task force to oppose the operation. Former governor Ben Nelson (D), now a U.S. senator, was hired as a lobbyist by meatpackers and ranchers. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) pressured the Justice Department to stop.

Members of Congress at first hostile to immigrants embraced "all the same people who were so repugnant to them before," Reed said, "and they prevailed." Operation Vanguard -- which was designed to expand to four states in four months and nationwide the next year, eventually including the lodging, food and construction industries -- was killed.

Congress "came to recognize that these people . . . had become a very important part of their community, churches, schools, sports, barbecues, families -- and most importantly the economy," Reed said. "You've got to be careful what you ask for."

The mention of Operation Vanguard provokes strong reactions in Omaha, where people say a similar effort today would still cause trouble.