Immigration Hardliners Pushing Pointless SAVE Act Through Congress

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted May 6, 2008.

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There’s nothing like a lot of well-organized noise to get lawmakers crackin’ on some truly brain-dead public policy. When people scream, ‘do something, anything!!’ legislators usually do, and the results are almost always ugly.

A good example is the SAVE Act, an enforcement-only immigration bill being hashed out in hearings this week on The Hill. It would cause abundant problems for employers and workers — citizens and legal immigrants as much as unauthorized workers — and would do absolutely nothing to fix our broken immigration system.

The bill would require employers to verify 130 million workers against a Social Security database over the next four years. So far, one percent of employers have been participating in a pilot program, and the error rate — the rate of false “no-match” findings — is around 8 percent. The overall number of incorrect records in the database is estimated to be around 17 million.

A creaky federal bureaucracy would be flooded with false no-matches, and they’d have to resolve each case within ten days or the employee — legal, illegal immigrants and citizens alike — would be fired if they failed to do so. If you have faith in the government’s ability to expedite those investigations in just ten days, then I have a lovely bridge you might consider as an investment property.

Of course, most employers who hire undocumented workers know they’re doing so, and choose to operate in our largely unregulated shadow economy because the incentives for doing so are great. That leaves lawmakers a choice between enacting very severe penalties for avoiding the system — penalties which would result in discrimination against workers who look like they might be undocumented — or set penalties that wouldn’t change the basic risk/benefit equation for employers in any real way. And as long as that’s the case, it wouldn’t significantly change the incentives for the workers.

“Enforcement only” has already proven to be ineffective in dealing with the kind of black markets in which employers buy unauthorized workers’ labor. It’s been 36 years since Richard Nixon first proclaimed a War on Drugs, and 35 years since the passage of the “Rockefeller” drug laws, with their long mandatory sentences for drug offenders. 25 years ago, Ronald Reagan promised a renewed effort in the drug war, with plenty of new law enforcement. All of these measures were unveiled with great fanfare amid promises that the “scourge” of illicit drugs would come to an end.

Billions of dollars and tens of thousands of incarcerations later, and anyone reading this in the U.S. can go purchase illegal drugs nearby and without much hassle.

And even if it weren’t an exercise in futility, who would enforce it? We have a sector of the economy where anything goes because the resources for enforcing workplace laws and worker protections have been slashed and slashed again during the past three decades.

The bill would also require law enforcement personnel to serve as ICE agents, investigating those suspected of immigration violations. That’s an invitation to racial profiling — between 70-80 percent of Latinos, for example, are citizens and/or permanent residents, and many would be asked to show their papers, please. But more than that, it’s a collosally stupid prioritization of finite law enforcement resources. Being in this country without paperwork isn’t a crime at all; entering without going through a checkpoint is a class B misdemeanor — the legal equivalent of passing a bad check for a small sum. And Congress would mandate that law enforcement agencies expend man- and woman-hours and other resources to catch these people? I’d prefer they did real cop stuff — focusing on violent crimes or major rip-offs.

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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.