Editorial: It's time for pragmatic federal action on illegal immigration
The issue of illegal immigrant workers finally hit home in Metrowest last week with the guilty plea of five former managers of IFCO Systems North America Inc. on a misdemeanor charge of hiring illegal immigrant workers. One of the five is a Shrewsbury man who worked at IFCO’s Westboro facility. With the diaspora of illegal immigrants throughout the U.S. economy, such workers have long since ceased to be a border state issue alone.
Federal investigators raided IFCO's operations in 26 states last April, arresting a reported 1,187 illegal immigrants. A bilingual informant, himself an illegal immigrant, aided in the investigation by becoming an IFCO employee and providing information to the feds about IFCO’s hiring practices. The findings: about 53 percent of the Social Security numbers of the company’s 5,800 person workforce in 2005 were invalid, didn’t match the name registered with the government, or belonged to people either too young, too old, or not alive enough to be refinishing pallets.
For the record, IFCO has released a statement saying that it did not intend to hire illegal immigrants "or to exploit any of our employees." The company "denies, without equivocation, any allegations to the contrary." IFCO states that it has cooperated fully with authorities over the last 10 months and has added HR staff and other trained employees in its payroll department, increased its field audit staff, and hired an internal auditor to assure future compliance with the law.
With 137 locations nationwide and reported 2006 sales of more than $647 million worldwide, this is a multinational corporation that has run afoul of U.S. immigration law. Imagine what’s going on at the small-business level.
For years, Carpenters Local 107 has been lobbying us here at WBJ to highlight what the union alleges are abuses by subcontractors who knowingly hire illegal workers, exploit and underpay them, and underbid the competition. What was missing in the equation was an individual – or preferably, individuals – brave enough or desperate enough to come forward, like the IFCO informant, to tell us their story.
The recent press on the IFCO case has brought illegal immigration back into the headlines by the size and scope of their admission. If a small business breaks the law, it’ a local concern – but if a multinational company does so, it’s a trend. Maybe now, the federal government will get religion and stop relying on states and municipalities to address the exploitation of undocumented workers.
We support the creation of meaningful legislation at the federal level to address the presence of the estimated 10 million illegal workers who are already in the country. Deportation is a blunt instrument, and as it is, many existing federal laws toward this effect are not enforced. Legislation that would allow "guest workers" and/or an opportunity to work toward citizenship, represents a more pragmatic approach to the problem. The Bush administration has an opportunity to address this issue in a realistic, level way, and we think it should seize the day to do so.
WBJ Web Partners
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