Crackdown long overdue

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

The recent federal crackdown on illegal immigrants working at meat processing plants was long overdue. If it marks a new seriousness by the Bush administration to honor America's labor laws, then it is a positive sign. Any planned overhaul of immigration should start with enforcement of the laws already on the books.

Raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Swift & Company facilities in six states resulted in the arrests of 1,187 workers and uncovered an identity theft ring that catered to illegal workers. Under a 1986 federal law that Washington has all but ignored, employers who do not obtain the proper identification from job applicants are supposed to be fined. In this case _ as in most others _ Swift had complied with the law in that it had asked for ID. Employers do not have to investigate whether the ID is fake or stolen; if it looks okay, they've done their job as far as the law is concerned.

This system obviously was made to be cheated on. Some states routinely issue drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants. (And consider that drivers' licenses are the ID we use to get onto airplanes.) Meanwhile, an entire industry of counterfeiters has risen. Some of the documents they manufacture are so good that even experts can't tell that they are phony.

And some illegal aliens use real Social Security numbers, many of them taken from children who are not yet in the workforce and therefore not using the numbers themselves. Other Social Security numbers are stolen from dead people.

Indeed, it was a federal investigation into a massive identity-fraud scheme that led to the raids at the Swift plants in Colorado, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Iowa and Minnesota. Criminals had stolen Americans' birth certificate, Social Security cards and other forms of ID and then sold them to illegal immigrants. In one case, a woman in North Carolina had received a Social Security Administration report indicating that her late brother worked in a Swift plant. She then filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

Defenders of illegal immigration like to say that undocumented workers do the jobs that Americans don't want to do. But is that really the case? The day after the immigration authorities arrested undocumented workers at the Swift plant in Greeley, Colo., lines of applicants to replace them immediately formed _ and these jobs don't pay nearly as well as meatpacking jobs did a generation ago.

In 1980, meatpacking paid an average $19 an hour, and the companies saw no shortage of workers. In the years that followed, however, the companies moved the plants away from the unionized cities in the Midwest and to rural parts of the Plains, where they recruited immigrants, many of them illegal. Now the average meatpacking job pays $7 an hour.

Will our hamburgers and steaks now cost more because the companies have to hire legal workers? Perhaps. But we pay American wages to lawyers, accountants and teachers. Why is it that only our most low-skilled workers have to compete with illegal labor?

The Bush administration's interest in enforcing these labor laws is belated but welcome. We hope that the raids on the Swift plants are the beginning of an earnest campaign to defend the labor market from unfair and illegal competition.