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    Judge Suspends Key Bush Effort in Immigration
    By Julia Preston
    The New York Times

    Thursday 11 October 2007

    A federal judge in San Francisco ordered an indefinite delay yesterday of a central measure of the Bush administration's new strategy to curb illegal immigration.

    The judge, Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California, said the government had failed to follow proper procedures for issuing a new rule that would have forced employers to fire workers if their Social Security numbers could not be verified within three months.

    Judge Breyer chastised the Department of Homeland Security for making a policy change with "massive ramifications" for employers, without giving any legal explanation or conducting a required survey of the costs and impact for small businesses.

    Under the rule issued by the department, which had been scheduled to take effect last month, employers would have to fire workers within 90 days after receiving a notice from the Social Security Administration that an employee's identity information did not match the agency's records. Illegal immigrants often present false Social Security information when applying for jobs.

    The rule, announced with fanfare in August by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, was the linchpin of the administration's effort to crack down on illegal immigration by denying jobs to the immigrants. It is part of a campaign of stepped-up enforcement since broader immigration legislation favored by President Bush was rejected by Congress in June.

    If allowed to take effect, the judge found, the rule could lead to the firing of many thousands of legally authorized workers, resulting in "irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers."

    The decision brought a sense of relief to the unusual coalition behind the lawsuit, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the United States Chamber of Commerce, often adversaries. They had feared that the measure would bring mass layoffs in low-wage industries, sweeping up both illegal and legal workers and disrupting the labor force.

    Judge Breyer's decision was an awkward disappointment for Mr. Chertoff, a former federal judge, who was relying on the rule as an enforcement tool since Congress left him with few other options.

    "We will continue to aggressively enforce our immigration laws while reviewing all legal options available to us in response to this ruling," Mr. Chertoff said yesterday in a statement.

    Mr. Chertoff said the administration was doing "as much administratively as we can, within the boundaries of existing law" to crack down on illegal immigration, but he called on Congress to revisit legislation to give legal status to illegal immigrants and to impose even tougher enforcement measures.

    Some conservative lawmakers who argue for vigorous enforcement of the immigration laws as a priority said they were outraged by the judge's ruling.

    "What part of 'illegal' does Judge Breyer not understand?" asked Representative Brian P. Bilbray, Republican of California and chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus. "Using a Social Security number that does not belong to you is a felony. Judge Breyer is compromising the rule of law principles that he took an oath to uphold."

    The rule establishes steps an employer must follow after receiving a notice from the Social Security Administration, known as a no-match letter, reporting that an employee's identity information does not match the agency's records.

    If the employee could not clarify the mismatch by providing valid information within 90 days, employers would be required to fire the worker or risk prosecution for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.

    The rule was set to take effect Sept. 14, but was held up temporarily on Aug. 31 by another judge in the San Francisco court, Maxine M. Chesney, who was sitting in for Judge Breyer at the time.

    Yesterday, Judge Breyer ordered a halt to the rule until the court could reach a final decision in the case, which could take many months. He made it clear he was skeptical of many of the government's arguments.

    The decision also bars the Social Security Administration from sending out about 141,000 no-match letters, covering more than eight million employees, which include notices from the Homeland Security Department explaining the new rule.

    Other groups bringing the lawsuit include the American Civil Liberties Union, the San Francisco Labor Council and several national and local small-business associations.

    Judge Breyer found that the Social Security database that the rule would draw upon was laden with errors not related to a worker's immigration status, which could result in no-match letters being sent to legally authorized workers. "There is a strong likelihood that employers may simply fire employees who are unable to resolve the discrepancy within 90 days," even if they are legal, he wrote.

    Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the government had demonstrated "a callous disregard for legal workers and citizens by adopting a rule that punished innocent workers and employers under the guise of immigration enforcement." A.F.L.-C.I.O officials had estimated that some 600,000 of their members could receive the letters and be vulnerable to unjust dismissal.

    In a December 2006 report cited in the court documents, the inspector general of the Social Security Administration estimated that 17.8 million of the agency's 435 million individual records contained discrepancies that could result in a no-match letter being sent to a legally authorized worker. Of those records with errors, 12.7 million belonged to native-born Americans, the report found.

    In a Sept. 18 letter to Mr. Chertoff, the Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration supported a claim in the suit that federal officials had failed to carry out a required analysis of the impact on small businesses before announcing the new rule. The office is independent from the Small Business Administration, which supported the rule.

    Judge Breyer is the brother of Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court and was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1997.

 

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    Crackdown Upends Slaughterhouse's Work Force
    By Steven Greenhouse
    The New York Times

    Friday 12 October 2007

    Tar Heel, NC - Last November, immigration officials began a crackdown at Smithfield Foods's giant slaughterhouse here, eventually arresting 21 illegal immigrants at the plant and rousting others from their trailers in the middle of the night.

    Since then, more than 1,100 Hispanic workers have left the 5,200-employee hog-butchering plant, the world's largest, leaving it struggling to find, train and keep replacements.

    Across the country, the federal effort to flush out illegal immigrants is having major effects on workers and employers alike. Some companies have reluctantly raised wages to attract new workers following raids at their plants.

    After several hundred immigrant employees at its plant in Stillmore, Ga., were arrested, Crider Poultry began recruiting Hmong workers from Minnesota, hiring men from a nearby homeless mission and providing free van transportation to many workers.

    So far, Smithfield has largely replaced the Hispanics with American workers, who often leave poorly paid jobs for higher wages at the plant here. But the turnover rate for new workers - many find the work grueling and the smell awful - is twice what it was when Hispanics dominated the work force.

    Making Smithfield's recruiting challenge even harder is the fact that many local residents have worked there before and soured on the experience. As a result, Smithfield often looks far afield for new employees.

    Fannie Worley, a longtime resident of Dillon, S.C., a largely African-American town of sagging trailers and ramshackle bungalows, quit her $5.25-an-hour, part-time job making beds at a Days Inn motel four months ago to take a $10.75-an-hour job at Smithfield. But Ms. Worley remains ambivalent.

    "It pays a lot better," she said. "But the trip is too long."

    Around 1 p.m. each day, C. J. Bailey, a Smithfield worker, picks up Ms. Worley and 10 other employees in his big white van. They arrive at the plant around 2:15, and he drops them back home after 1 a.m.

    Several of the newly hired workers in the van - they pay $40 a week for the ride - said they were thinking of quitting, unhappy about having to commute so far and work so hard. At the plant, where the pay averages around $12 an hour, many spend hour after hour slitting hogs' throats, hacking at shoulders and carving ribs and loins. At the end of their shifts, many workers complain that their muscles are sore and their minds are numb.

    Employee turnover has long been a problem at Smithfield and other meat-processing plants, but the problem has grown worse recently. Dennis Pittman, a Smithfield spokesman, said 60 percent of the new workers quit within 90 days of being hired, compared with 25 percent to 30 percent two years ago when many new employees were illegal immigrants.

    "I've heard officials from a couple of other meat processors say they've never seen such high turnover with new workers," Mr. Pittman said.

    Several Southern companies have raised wages to attract new workers after immigration raids. "But that's not the first thing that employers are going to do," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. "They're going to try to cast their net wider before they do something that will raise costs."

    Smithfield, for example, has run a flood of television advertisements boasting that the company is a good, safe place to work. The advertisements aim to persuade Carolinians to apply for jobs and to counter arguments made by a union trying to organize the plant that Smithfield jobs are high stress and unsafe, with stingy benefits.

    One of the toughest challenges, Mr. Pittman said, has been training new employees to handle the highest-skilled jobs at a plant that processes 30,000 hogs a day.

    "The big problem is we lost a lot of people who were there a long time," Mr. Pittman said. "We have been facing difficulties in hiring for a number of years, because as the economy got better, the labor market became much tighter."

    When the plant opened in 1992, the area's jobless rate was high because tobacco was in retreat and textile mills were closing. Early on, most employees were black. That changed with an influx of Hispanic immigrants, most of them Mexicans, in the mid-1990s.

    Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, said the Hispanics should not be viewed as shoving blacks aside, because the plant had such high turnover.

    "It's not as if these jobs were stable sources of employment for creating a black middle class," Mr. Kromm said.

    The way Hector David, a longtime worker from Mexico who quit in February, sees it, Smithfield had been eager to hire Hispanics because they worked so hard. "The Americans just don't work as well," Mr. David said. "In Mexico, we work from the age of 5 in the corn fields. We're used to working hard."

    The New York Times wrote about the sometimes uneasy relations between blacks and Hispanics at the Smithfield plant as part of a 2000 series that examined race relations in the United States.

    Mr. Pittman said Smithfield did its best to ensure that immigrant employees had legitimate documentation. But many workers said Smithfield did not look too hard at the paperwork.

    Last November, the company notified 640 employees that their identity information did not match government records. In January, federal agents arrested 21 workers at the plant, and in August, helped by information the company provided, agents arrested 28 more, many at home.

    Mr. Pittman said cooperating with immigration officials "serves our goal of 100 percent compliance 100 percent of the time." But for many families, the cooperation has come at a price.

    Tears came to Maritza Cruz's eyes as she described the scene when immigration agents banged on her trailer door at 3 a.m. and arrested her husband, Alejandro, who faces deportation. "Everyone is very scared, especially after they arrested people at their homes," said Mrs. Cruz, who has four children and is on maternity leave from the plant.

    The company and its employees are not the only ones affected by the crackdown.

    Since the enforcement actions began, said Jazmin Gastelum, owner of a local Christian bookstore, La Tierra Prometida, business from Hispanic customers has plunged 40 percent at her store and two nearby Hispanic groceries. "A lot of people are going back to Mexico," Ms. Gastelum said. "And a lot who haven't moved are scared to go outside."

    As for the workers who remain at the plant, many wonder why so many new employees come from South Carolina. Gene Bruskin, the director of the unionization campaign, sees a simple explanation.

    "Thousands and thousands of workers from North Carolina have come through the plant, and they left, saying, ÔNo way,' because they were injured or didn't want to work in such an oppressive atmosphere," Mr. Bruskin said. "This plant burned up a large number of people, and the word got around about their bad experiences."

    Mr. Pittman said Smithfield had hired many workers from South Carolina because the counties close to the plant had a low unemployment rate.

    The immigration arrests have also created problems for the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has spent 15 years seeking to organize the plant.

    "A lot of the people who left or were detained were strong union supporters," said Gabriel Lopez Rivera, a Smithfield worker.

    Mr. Bruskin, the union official, added, "It's extremely difficult for workers to stand up for their rights when they're threatened with arrest or deportation."

    The Tar Heel workers voted against unionizing in 1994 and 1997, but the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Smithfield had broken the law by intimidating and firing union supporters.

    The company has called for a new election, but the union instead wants Smithfield to accept unionization through a majority sign-up, a process that would give management less opportunity to pressure workers.

    In recent months, union organizers have adopted a new role, rushing to the trailers of immigrant workers facing arrest to ensure that someone can care for their children.

    Union officials recently organized educational forums at a Roman Catholic church in Red Springs, where immigrant workers were advised, among other things, to sign power of attorney forms designating someone to take care of their children, finances and homes if they were arrested.

    "I think all this turmoil is helping unionization," said the Rev. Carlos Arce, the priest there, "because people feel alone and unprotected, and they see that the union, along with the Catholic Church, is the only organization that is trying to help them."