Faced with an impending crackdown on those who hire illegal
workers, South County businesses are growing anxious.
Gilroy – Faced with an impending crackdown on those who hire illegal workers, South County businesses are growing anxious.
Immigrants fear being locked out of the workforce, either because they’re illegal or because of Social Security snafus. Marcela Escarero has spent 15 years in Gilroy, earning minimum wage potting plants. She has legal status, but worries about friends and family who don’t.
“It’s bad, but there’s nothing we can do,” Escarero said, gazing across the cherry orchard near her Gilroy home. Farm jobs are already disappearing, she lamented. “The majority don’t have papers. Some say, ‘Let’s just go home.’ ”
New federal rules will impose stepped-up fines on employers who receive so-called “no match letters,” which list Social Security numbers that don’t match employees’ names. Employers have 90 days to solve the mismatch – or fire the worker. If they don’t, they could face fines of up to $11,000.
The enforcement will begin in less than a month.
Farmers complain the enforcement will strip them of workers: More than half of the sector’s 1 million laborers don’t have valid Social Security numbers, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
“Tell them to give us robots,” said Tim Chiala, manager of George Chiala Farms, which grows garlic and jalapeño peppers in Morgan Hill. “If our labor contractors can’t get people, how can we harvest?”
Chiala isn’t alone. burden local employers.
“There’s got to be a better way,” she said, “without putting so much of the proof on the employer.”
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said they were forced to beef up enforcement of existing laws after Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration-reform bill.
“We’re going as far as we possibly can without Congress acting,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.
About 10 percent of Social Security numbers turn up incorrect, said Lowell Kepke, regional spokesman for the Social Security Administration; of those, 60 percent are quickly resolved using a computer program that detects “obvious, simple mistakes” such as minor misspellings. SSA sends “no match” letters to large employers with at least 10 mismatches, Kepke said. Common mistakes include listing maiden names instead of married names and confusing the matronymic and patronymic surnames used among Mexicans. This month, roughly 140,000 such letters will wing their way to employers nationwide, said Kepke, addressing errors found in 2006 tax records.
Illegal immigrants often supply made-up numbers to get jobs, but employers complain the system also returns false mismatches due to misspellings or changed names. Hollister farm labor contractor Ramiro Rodriguez gets about 90 mismatches a year, he estimated – about 10 percent of his total workforce. It takes roughly two weeks to a month to clear up errors, he said.
“We do seasonal work,” he said, “and by the time Social Security gets back to us, our employees are long gone.”
Beefed-up enforcement will only sweeten the trade in fake documents, argued Don Villarejo, former director of the California Institute for Rural Studies. Years ago, he discovered that someone in Los Angeles was using his name and number to work.
“People with good Social Security numbers will sell their information to the highest bidder,” he said. “We’re just playing paper games to try and address this immigration problem.”
Conservative groups lauded the move for pulling away the carrot for illegal immigration – jobs – while serving employers with the stick. Businesses have profited from the cheap labor supplied by illegal workers, but taxpayers have paid the price in education, health care and social services, argued Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
“Employers have hired illegal immigrants with impunity, and it undercuts the ability of legal workers to find jobs at decent wages,” said Mehlman. “But most employers will obey most laws, if they know that somebody’s out there enforcing them.”
From behind her cash register at Los Arcos Market and Panaderia, co-owner Araceli Garcia worries not only about her customers – half of whom are Mexican immigrants, she said – but also about her Gilroy shop’s bottom line.
“It’s no good,” she said, running her fingers along a case of tamarind candy. “It’s going to hurt this city’s economy – and especially small shops like ours.”
