Illegal immigration today: System either rewards motivated workers, or chases away il

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Illegal immigration today: System either rewards motivated workers, or chases away illegals

YAVAPAI COUNTY - The business of being in business is hard without good employees. For one local business owner who operates in Yavapai County and in another state as well, that lesson comes with a postscript, that a change in the ground rules can prove who the best employees were all along.

Jerry (not his real name), doesn't want his name revealed, or even the nature of his business, for fear that his past infractions would come back to haunt him, but agreed to talk in general terms about how the Legal Arizona Workers Act changed how he did business, and opened his eyes.

"Back before the law," Jerry said, "if you really weren't sure, you got the driver's license and the Social Security card and kept them on file with the I-9 form."

And even though those processes kept Jerry's business within legal limits, somewhere in his mind he was pretty sure he was hiring illegal immigrants.

"It's an illegal element, and when you make that a part of your business, you become illegal yourself," he said.

Not only that, it wasn't saving nearly enough money to make up for the hassle of keeping two separate payrolls, because some of the workers had talked him into paying them cash, even though he paid them at rates comparable to what his legitimate employees earned.

But it was ongoing, so the passage of the employer sanctions bill, with its requirement to check the legal authorization of each new employee, threatened to change the status quo.

"I was very angry when the law passed," Jerry said.

But then a strange thing happened. His most important employees that happened to be undocumented went back to their homelands, submitted to the legal process, and then came back to work.

"I had one guy who was here for 13 or 14 years," he said. "He came to me and said he didn't want to lose his house and everything else he'd worked for. So he went home and came back, and now I don't have to step around the law to have a good worker.

"The guys that didn't want to do what it took to get legal, they just disappeared."

The workforce, and the workplace, in Yavapai County are far different from the other state in which Jerry does business.

"Over there," he said, "the option of getting your Social Security card at the flea market is alive and well."

And even though he's no longer worried about being punished for his hiring practices, Jerry still has a latent soft spot for the sacrifices undocumented workers make to come to America.

"I think when you hire someone who has camped out in the desert for several days, been arrested by the Border Patrol and sent back, done it again and maybe been injured, and he still wants to come here and work and send money back to his family, there's a certain part of you that wants to see that person succeed," he said.

"On the other hand, the ones that stuck around and took care of business are the ones that are serious."



Day labor is a whole new game

If a guy without papers wants to work in Yavapai County and fears the impact of employer sanctions on full-time employment, there's still day labor available. There's not as much as there used to be, and it doesn't pay as well as it once did, but it's available for those willing to take a calculated risk.

Rafael Fuentes is from El Salvador and has spent most of his adult life in Arizona, with and without papers. He hangs with some guys in the yard of a private residence on Hillside Avenue in Prescott, some of whom are authorized to work and some of whom are not, waiting for work that doesn't always arrive.

Four and five years ago, Rafael said, as many as 60 men waited for pickup trucks at the then-controversial location at the end of Lincoln Avenue, not far from where just a handful of hopefuls do the same today.

"A lot of people went back to Mexico," he said, discounting the notion that many have moved to states such as Colorado, Utah or New Mexico, where immigration laws are not as Draconian as Arizona's. "There's no jobs over there, either."

Rafael believes that the economic downturn that coincided with Arizona's stricter immigration enforcement was more damaging to the underground labor economy than the laws themselves.

"Right here," he said, gesturing at the men on the corner, "there's a lot of people with green cards, with papers. Sometimes there's even white people here, looking for work. But they can't find jobs either."

But the latest wave of immigration laws, from employer sanctions to SB1070, have made it more difficult both for Rafael's friends on the corner and for those who would like to use their services.

"I tell the guys, it's scary but you have to do what you have to do," he said. "Some people come here and ask to see papers and some don't. It's good for the economy here because you come over here and you get the labor for less. With this economy, what else do you need?"

And even though statistics show that the number of Hispanics and Latinos living in Yavapai County has nearly doubled over the past 10 years, from about 13,300 in 2000 to about 26,400 in 2010, Rafael believes many white folk still look upon that population with suspicion.

"Thank God those people who crashed those airplanes, those al-Qaidas, weren't Mexicans or Latinos," he said. "It's already like, 'Hey, this guy is taking everything and not paying taxes.'"

Rafael, 38, has American-born kids in school that he hopes to be able to send to college. That's why he says he returned to El Salvador a few years back and waited a year for a work permit, only to return to find a collapsing economy.

Now, he's staying and working when he can to keep his daughters' educations going.

"If I don't make money," he said, "at least my kids go to school over here. If I didn't have my family here, I wouldn't stay."

Illegal immigration today: Employer sanctions removed the carrot


YAVAPAI COUNTY - By the time Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB1070 into law in April 2010, a previous law, combined with a sharp downturn in the state's economy, had already cut into the fundamental reason most undocumented workers came here in the first place: to make some money and better support their families.

And even though the Legal Arizona Workers Act (sometimes called the Employer Sanctions Act) of 2007 has gone a long way toward decreasing the numbers of illegal immigrants to the state, lawmakers seem disinclined to expand a portion of the law that could reduce the problem even further.

Only about 35 percent of employers statewide, and less than 30 percent of Yavapai County employers, had registered to use the federal e-verify system as of October 2010. The law requires all employers to use the system, which verifies that new employees are eligible to work in the United States by searching Social Security records, but imposes no sanctions against those who don't.

Penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, though, can be severe, up to and including the loss of the right to do business in the state. That, according to Representative and Speaker of the Arizona House Andy Tobin, is sufficient reason to use caution.

"It's clearly a deterrent," Tobin said. "If you're going to be hiring people, you ought to sign up. It's a violation of the law not to and, if you follow the system, you're not going to have a problem."

Given the size of Arizona's undocumented alien population, currently estimated at about 400,000, many people in the early 2000s were enraged about those folks taking advantage of public benefits such as healthcare and schooling at taxpayer expense.

But even the staunchest detractors of illegal immigration allow that the Social Security and Medicare payments made by unauthorized workers and their employers comes to a significant amount of money, even while arguing that those paid taxes pale in comparison with the cost taxpayers bear in supporting the health and education needs of the undocumented.

In its report, "The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers (updated February 2011)," the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that roughly half of the nation's 11.2 million undocumented workers are employed in the "above-ground economy" and have $8.67 billion withheld in Social Security and Medicare taxes. The report fails to mention that employers pay a matching amount of both types of taxes, bringing the total collected, for services that in almost all cases will never be provided, to $17.34 billion.

Even then, the report maintains, supporting undocumented workers costs every American household $1,075 per year, further noting that, because of larger than average numbers of undocumented immigrants in California, Arizona and Nevada, taxpayers in these states bear a greater than average burden.

The figures are staggering, but Cottonwood Town Council Member Ruben Jauregui suggests that a question remains as to who created the issue in the first place, the people looking to work and feed their families or the employer who saw an opportunity to make more profit while avoiding some tax liability?

"Who's more to blame?" he asked. "Is it the person who gets a job, and they're getting paid a substandard wage and no benefits? Does the employer have more culpability in that or does the worker have more culpability?"

And that is why the Legal Arizona Workers Act, which the U.S. Congress is currently trying to replicate in a federal law applicable in all states, has made the most impact on the issue.

The FAIR report puts that same point on the way to curb illegal immigration, a way that appears to be already on the way to working in Arizona, when it states that "the influx of illegal aliens can be stemmed by effectively denying job opportunities to those illegally seeking them. When that happens, the illegal alien population will steadily decline through attrition."

The act's enforceability, though, remains in question.

Deputy Yavapai County Attorney Jack Fields heads the department's civil division and is in charge of fielding complaints and initiating investigations into allegations of employers hiring unauthorized workers. With the help of an in-house investigator, Fields said the department at this time has five active investigations, but has yet to file civil charges against an employer.

Fields said prosecution of the cases is difficult for multiple reasons. One is the statute's language, which states that an employer shall not "knowingly" employ an unauthorized alien, requiring a prosecutor to prove intent, often a tricky matter.

Plus, Fields said, "I think you're not seeing much action because we lack some tools we could use."

He said a failed 2010 effort to put some teeth into the act would have allowed county attorneys to depose witnesses and issue subpoenas for business records if reasonable suspicion existed that the employer in question was hiring unauthorized workers.

"We're being diligent as far as enforcing the law," Fields said, "but we're finding that it's very difficult to put these cases together."
http://www.dcourier.com/main.asp?Sec...rticleID=99095

Decreased undocumented population eases strain on local law enforcement

YAVAPAI COUNTY - The combination of economic dire straits and strong anti-illegal immigration laws has proven beneficial in some respects for local law enforcement, most notably because of a sharp slowdown in the number of undocumented immigrants booked into the jail.

Yavapai County Sheriff Scott Mascher, well aware that the number of undocumented aliens taken into custody and/or housed by his department has dropped by nearly two-thirds since 2008, cited the combined factors as a reason.

"The coyotes (human smugglers) realize that Yavapai County is a 287g county and we're actively enforcing," Mascher said. "Plus, I think that at one time we had a booming economy and lots of jobs that were filled by illegal immigrants."

YCSO is one of only 83 departments nationwide with 287g status, under which designated personnel receive training in immigration enforcement and have the legal ability to detain suspected illegal immigrants for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which deports convicted illegal aliens after they have completed their jail or prison sentences.

In 2008, 1,109 illegal immigrants landed in the county jail at some point. By 2010, that number had fallen to 309 and, thus far in 2011, only 134 had been taken into county custody by mid-September, a number that would prorate out to fewer than 200 by year's end.

According to Mascher, the changes couldn't have come at a better time.

"From 2008 to now," he said, "our budget is approximately $3 million less. We've been short-handed and we place our public safety duties over enforcing federal laws. But we're doing the same things now as we were doing in 2008. In 2008, 20 percent of our jail population was illegal immigrants. Now it's in the single digits."

That decrease in population has had a side benefit, too. In the last fiscal year, Mascher said the department was able to rent bed space to federal authorities, to the tune of almost $2.5 million.

"The biggest thing we've been working on with the illegal immigrants is the narcotics," Mascher said. "That's what affects us here the most, the drugs going north and the cash going south."

YCSO has three 287g-trained officers, and they primarily work in the jail, where ICE can follow up on detainees whose immigration status is suspect.

Ed Preciado, ICE's deputy field officer for detention and removal in northern Arizona, said it makes fiscal sense for the officers in the cooperative program to be in the jail, where they can use available tools to identify detainees who are here illegally.

"Due to our limited resources, that's where we get the most bang for our buck," Preciado said. "If they get booked into the jail, they're going to get identified and through biometrics, specifically fingerprints. They can't just give us a name and a date of birth. Fingerprints don't lie."

As to the perceived decline in the amount of criminal activity on the part of illegal immigrants in northern Arizona, Preciado agrees it is so.

"We have seen a decrease," he said. "I think the word has gotten out to the smuggling community that this is not a place to come to and do business."

All things considered, Mascher believes the scarcity of crowds of men looking for day labor shows that illegal immigration to these parts is on the decline.

"We used to have a booming economy and lots of jobs that were filled by illegal immigrants," he said. "We used to have places where guys stood and waited for work in Ash Fork and Cornville but we just don't see that anymore. You add in the workplace enforcement and we just don't have the jobs we used to."

And the number of drug and human smugglers on the freeways has decreased, as well. Authorities believe the smugglers are consolidating their loads of drugs and/or immigrants in order to reduce their footprint on the roads.

"The troops are working hard and doing a great job," Mascher said. "I look at our K9 teams and they're making the same amount of stops as before and I ask them, where are the illegals? They tell me they're just not seeing them."

The same combination of factors has eased an aspect of the strain on the Adult Probation Department, according to Chief Billie Grobe.

"I suspect (the undocumented probationers) will probably leave (the country), and we'll see an increase in warrants," Grobe said in November 2007, anticipating the implementation of the Legal Arizona Workers Act.

She turned out to be right on the mark.

"When the (employer sanctions) law took effect, almost overnight, when the officers were out doing their work in the field, people were no longer at their addresses," Grobe said recently. "They had absconded."

She added that the department, pre-2008, had three Spanish-speaking-only caseloads of 60-65 cases each.

"We don't have that any more," Grobe said. "With those caseloads disappearing we were able to tighten our belts when belts needed tightening."
http://www.dcourier.com/main.asp?Sec...rticleID=99069