8/28/2007

Among the most infuriating and potentially dangerous is the crackdown involving “no-match letters,” which the Social Security Administration sends to companies when discrepancies exist between employee records and its database. The agency plans to send 140,000 letters this year to businesses with 10 or more employees with apparent data inaccuracies. The businesses have to resolve the problems or fire the workers.

Hard-liners are cheering. Employers across our immigrant-dependent economy are bracing for hardship and chaos. But not all of those 1.4 million workers are lawbreakers. A report last December by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general found that the database is plagued with a 4.1 percent error rate: data entry mistakes, misspellings and name changes involving about 17.8 million records. Those are the records on which no-match letters are based, making them a dangerously unreliable indicator of someone’s immigration status or authorization to work.

It is impossible to know how many workers will be unjustly driven from their jobs by the no-match crackdown and stepped-up workplace raids. In a climate of bureaucratic confusion and fear, workers with no-match problems could be summarily fired by employers who don’t want to bother resolving them. The presumption of guilt will be an invitation to discriminate against native-born Latino and Asian workers, too.

The Administration wants a militarized border and an illegal-immigrant-free economy, but without more visas to clear backlogs and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, illegality will remain chronic. It will get worse as people forced off the books by the federal government try to survive by finding more furtive employment. As workers go further underground, shady employers will, too. Some will relocate abroad. Some will set up businesses making better forged documents.