Speech #1090136113

It is an amendment that I worked on with Senator GRASSLEY. as well as Senator KENNEDY. And as I indicated. it will be offered shortly. One of the central components of immigration reform is enforcement. This bill contains a number of important provisions to beef up border security. But that is not enough. Real enforcement also means drying up the pool of jobs that encourages illegal immigration. That can only happen if employers do not hire illegal workers. Unfortunately. our current employer enforcement system does little to nothing to deter illegal immigrants from finding work. Just a few statistics: Overall. the number of workplace arrests of illegal immigrants fell from 17.552 in 1997 to 451 in 2002. even as illegal immigration grew during that time. Moreover. between 25 percent to 40 percent of all undocumented immigrants are people who have overstayed their visas. They are not folks who will be stopped by a wall. Rather. the only way to effectively deter overstays is to reduce their access to employment. When Congress last passed an immigration bill in 1986. we did not provide any meaningful way for employers to check legal eligibility to work. Currently. employees can prove their legal status by showing a variety of documents. and employers are supposed to record their inspection of such documents by filling out an 19 form for each employee. As a consequence. the market for fraudulent documentsfake Social Security cards. drivers licenses. birth certificates--has exploded. Unfortunately. with more than 100 million employees in more than 6 million workplaces. and only about 788 Wage and Hour investigators. employer sanctions have basically become a nuisance requirement to maintain records. not a serious risk of penalty. As a result. the number of "intent to fine" notices issued to employers for hiring undocumented workers dropped from 417 in 1999 to just 3 in 2004. I want to repeat that. There were three employers in the entire United States in 2004 who were fined for hiring undocumented workers. Now. understandably. employers cannot always detect forged documents. And employers who reject workers with questionable documents risk employment discrimination suits. That is why we need a better alternative. We need an electronic verification system that can effectively detect the use of fraudulent documents. significantly reduce the employment of illegal workers. and give employers the confidence that their workforce is legal. When Congress first considered comprehensive immigration reform in April. the legislation on the floor addressed this problem by creating a national employment eligibility verification system. Senators GRASSLEY. KYL. and I all thought this was a good idea in theory. but we had concerns with the design of the system.