…and, says the LA Times, possibly the trigger for a recession in 2009 or thereabouts, starting with California.
A new fence? A massive influx of Border Patrol agents? A fleet of airborne drones? No. The new weapon is a simple two-page letter that will go out next month to companies whose employees’ names and Social Security numbers do not match those on record at the Social Security Administration.
What makes these letters so potent? The SSA has been sending similar notices for years, but in the past, as long as a company had asked to see a worker’s papers and filled out the proper forms, it was off the hook. Now the government is demanding that unauthorized employees be fired and threatening legal action if they aren’t. This is expected to trigger widespread layoffs — self-policing by millions of small and medium-sized businesses in California and other states.
Emphasis mine; read the whole thing. As I’ve said before, the immigration system is horribly broken — we need to have some workable way for employers to hire seasonal Mexican workers legally. For background, see this remarkably conservative (!!!) NewsHour report on the ag worker shortages. From the NewsHour report:
TOM BEARDEN: Talbott had no choice but to turn to a federal guest-worker program called H2A. It was first established in 1943 and reformed in 1986 during the last round of immigration reform. Last year, farmers throughout the country used H2A to legally bring in more than 59,000 agricultural workers from outside the United States.BRUCE TALBOTT: The H2A program is the government visa program to bring in farm workers. And it’s a very expensive, bureaucratic and cumbersome process, so we’ve tried to avoid it as long as we could. We always saw H2A as an act of desperation and something you would only do as a last-ditch effort to stay in business. We didn’t expect to end up there.
Again, read the whole thing. But in short, the current “system” has guest-worker caps that are ridiculously low and is too expensive and cumbersome for employers anyway. So employers have avoided it and used illegals instead, in part because nobody forced them to do otherwise.
Now the government’s doing just that. Here’s hoping for further good news on this front.