Lovell, Malcolm, Jr.: 67 70 136 139 Cost-Benefit Analysis of President_Reagan's Employer Sanctions Propos- Discriminatory Effects of Employer Sanctions Programs Under Consider- ation by the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, from the Institute for Public Representation, Georgetown University News release, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, September 30, 1981. Notes From the Underground-Millions of Illegal Workers Will Not Be 177 THE KNOWING EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1981 U.S. SENATE, SUBCOMMITTEE ON IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE POLICY, Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:35 a.m., in room 412, Russell Building, Hon. Alan Simpson (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. Present: Senators Simpson, Grassley, Kennedy, and DeConcini. Also present: Richard Day, chief counsel and staff director, and Charles Wood, counsel. OPENING STATEMENT OF ALAN K. SIMPSON, U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF WYONING, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE POLICY Senator SIMPSON. Good morning. Today the subcommittee's series of hearings on the major issues of immigration law reform continues with the very critical subject of employer sanctions. The series will continue in October, when we will have at least five more hearings. I will share with you here today the quarters of the Veterans Affairs Committee, which I chair. That is the only way I can find a room around this place. It is not exactly copious, but it is the only one we can have surety of obtaining. So today we are on the issue of employer sanctions. I continue to believe and know, as many of you do, that the enforcement of our immigration laws is indeed in the national interest. Yet the potential benefits and protections of even the most carefully designed statutory standards for determining who may enter the United States for how long, and under what conditions, will not be available in practice if those statutory standards cannot be enforced. One of the problems, of course, is that some individuals and companies derive very great short-term economic benefits from uncontrolled immigration. However, what is in the short term and purely economic interest of certain industries or even of existing American consumers is not necessarily in the overall interest of the Nation, either long term or short term. Illegal immigration can produce adverse impacts which should be balanced against any short-term economic benefits to certain industries or consumers. I do not intend to review those adverse impacts at this time. If the use of foreign workers is, on balance, beneficial under certain cir (1) cumstances and conditions, then the law, I think, should reflect that by allowing legal use of the worker when those conditions are present. Obviously, however, the net benefit will not be obtained if such conditions cannot be enforced. I am one of those who has the opinion that enforcement of the immigration laws will not be achieved without employer sanctions. At the present time it is my view that conventional law enforcement approaches would not be adequate to control illegal border crossings or visa abuse even if substantially more resources were devoted to that effort than appears to be at all likely or possible at the moment, given domestic political and foreign policy considerations. We all know the facts, the thousands and thousands of miles of sea and land border. It is impossible to completely monitor it at any reasonable level of law enforcement activity. At the present time there are only 22,233 border patrol officers, with only about 450 patrolling at any one time. Even if the border patrol budget were more than doubled-which is obviously quite unlikely—a substantial level of illegal border crossings would continue. Furthermore, a significant portion of illegal aliens enter legally and then violate the terms of their visa. No amount of border enforcement is going to keep them out. At the present time there is a substantial disparity in job opportunities between the United States and the Third World countries, a disparity which is very likely to continue or to widen as a result of political and social conditions in those countries. As long as greater U.S. job opportunities are available to foreign nationals who succeed in physically entering the United States, this intense migration pressure on the United States will continue. Migration pressure on the United States will decline only if the pull of U.S. employment is eliminated or this disparity is reducedeither through improved living standards in the Third World or, I suppose, through deterioration in the United States. Since improvement in the Third World is a long-term prospect, at best, though a laudable one, and since deterioration in the United States is certainly not an attractive resolution, it seems to me that one approach remains. Simply to reduce the availability of U.S. job opportunities through sanctions or penalties against the employment of illegal immigrants. That is the subject of our hearing throughout this day. I look forward to the testimony of each of you. So we will proceed. I think you have all been advised of the time limitations which have been imposed so that we might get through this rather significant agenda of the day. At this point I will recognize Doris Meissner, the Acting Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who is accompanied today by David Hiller, a special assistant to our Attorney General. The other members of the panel include: Mr. Malcolm Lovell, Undersecretary of the Department of Labor, and Ambassador Diego Asencio, Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs of the Department of State. So if you will please proceed. Certainly we are eager to hear your testimony. STATEMENT OF DORIS MEISSNER, ACTING COMMISSIONER, IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, ACCOMPANIED BY DAVID HILLER, SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE ATTORNEY GENERAL Ms. MEISSNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased today to appear to discuss the enforcement activities of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the administration's employer sanction proposal. The committee has a full statement from the Department of Justice. I will excerpt from it at this time. In his statement before this subcommittee on July 30, 1981, the Attorney General placed in clear focus the need for immediately overhauling and strengthening this Nation's immigration laws. The Immigration and Naturalization Service of the Department of Justice is charged with enforcement of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which includes the control of illegal aliens seeking to enter or presently residing in the United States. Över the past several years the policies of INS have consistently been to locate, apprehend, and remove illegal aliens employed in this country. Emphasis is placed on aliens in jobs which would be attractive to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent resident aliens. The Department of Justice has long recognized the futility of attempting to intercept all illegal aliens at the border, thus depending solely on border interdiction as an effective deterrent. The borders are simply too extensive to seal effectively, and border patrol resources are stretched to the fullest. In addition to its border interdiction efforts, therefore, INS has gradually expanded an interior enforcement program to identify and remove at least a portion of the illegal aliens who have successfully found employment in the population centers of the United States. Thus, INS investigators are assigned to large metropolitan areas where concentrations of illegal aliens are known to live or work. Many aliens apprehended in the interior are employed in wellpaying jobs attractive to U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. For example, in Denver within the last 2 months employment referrals by INS officers to the State of Colorado Department of Labor resulted in placing 36 unemployed citizens and permanent resident aliens into jobs paying between $5 and $14 per hour. Since January 1981 approximately 145 places of employment have been referred to the State of Illinois Department of Labor for recruitment subsequent to Service enforcement efforts. These referrals represent more than 500 employment vacancies which have been made available to unemployed citizens and resident aliens. Although the removal of 143,000 illegal aliens from the interior represents a significant number of successful investigations, INS is the first to realize the limitations of its present interior enforcement program. While the investigative resources of the INS are carefully targeted to achieve maximum impact, additional mechanisms are needed to deter employment of illegal aliens that will be both more effective and more economical to utilize. Without an enforcement tool to make the hiring of illegal aliens unprofitable, INS efforts to prevent the participation of illegal aliens in the labor market will continue to realize, at best, only limited success and, at worst, failure to keep pace with the growing numbers of illegals in the workplace. It is arguable that the absence of a law for instituting sanctions against employers who hire aliens unauthorized to work in the United States serves as an enticement to foreign workers. Today, even if an employer is found to be employing illegal aliens, the penalty is merely a temporary interruption of the production schedule, and the cost and inconvenience of finding and training replacements. The employer is also free to hire still more illegal aliens with impunity. And even where the Service has successfully targeted its resources and apprehended numbers of illegal aliens in the workplace, it is largely powerless to interrupt the flow, to take steps to turn off the spigot controlled by the unscrupulous or uncooperative employer. Since most illegal aliens come to the United States to work, the most effective enforcement measures are those that require all prospective employees to demonstrate eligibility to work in the United States, while simultaneously placing responsibilities on prospective employers to assure that persons who are hired are in fact legally authorized to work. Increasing current enforcement efforts will not in itself deter the growing_number of illegal aliens who seek work in the United States. The Department of Justice believes that many employers hire illegal aliens because they are aware that there is no law that makes such practices illegal. With an employer sanctions law, we believe most employers, as generally law-abiding citizens, will uphold the law. As many as 75 percent of employers in the United States will voluntarily comply with the law and will refuse to knowingly hire illegal aliens. We base this belief largely on the spirit of voluntary cooperation the Immigration and Naturalization Service has exerienced with employers in various parts of the country in conjunction with a pilot program known as operation cooperation. Operation cooperation was conceived and implemented in the Denver district office in 1975. Los Angeles then implemented the program and has continued it since. The plan consists of obtaining an agreement from company management to conduct a survey of its employees and, after the survey, assisting management in replacing the employees who were found to be illegal aliens with other workers who pass an INS record check. At present, Los Angeles has 27 companies participating in this program. In Denver, 33 companies are participating. The program is most effective among production-type businesses where a semiskill is required. Service-type businesses, hotels and restaurants or any nonskill employment require greater efforts to maintain a successful program. The ability of INS to make regular contact with participating companies and to respond immediately to requests for screening of job applicants inevitably assures effective screening and positive results. With employer sanctions, interior enforcement efforts of the |