The New York Times
Friday 14 December 2007
Phoenix - A new Arizona law against employing illegal immigrants has shaken businesses, scared workers, delighted advocates of stricter immigration controls and added to tensions in a state split over who belongs here and who does not.
And that is even before the law's scheduled effective date, Jan. 1.
State officials are seeking to curb illegal immigration by choking the supply of jobs with the law, which threatens to pull the business license of any employer that knowingly hires an illegal immigrant.
It is an example of the scores of state and municipal laws meant to address illegal immigration on the belief that the federal government has not done enough to thwart it. But the Arizona version is among the toughest and could test states' ability to crack down on the countless businesses that have relied on illegal workers.
Arizona makes for a striking laboratory. Its estimated population of 500,000 illegal immigrants is among the highest and fastest growing in the country, and illegal workers make up an estimated 9 percent to 12 percent of the work force, mostly in low-skill jobs in the service, construction and landscaping industries, according to research at Arizona State University.
Legal challenges to the law, signed in July by Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, were filed by business and immigrant rights groups, asserting that the law would usurp federal authority, lead to ethnic profiling and hinge on sometimes inaccurate government records. A federal judge on Tuesday will consider a temporary restraining order blocking the law from going into effect; the judge rejected another challenge last week.
Businesses and immigration groups say they have already tallied some of the effects of the law.
Advocates for immigrants contend that, at a minimum, hundreds of people unauthorized to work have left the state or been fired. Some school districts have at least partly attributed enrollment drops to the law. Though the housing slump and seasonal economic factors make it difficult to pin down how much is attributable to the new law, illegal workers say employers are checking papers and are less inclined to hire them.
"They started asking everybody for papers one day, and those like me that didn't have them were fired," said Luis Baltazar, a Mexican immigrant who worked for a paving company until a few weeks ago and was soliciting work at a day labor hiring hall here.
Another immigrant, Jose Segovia, said work had plummeted in the past few weeks, more so than in the four previous Decembers he spent in Phoenix. "Some of my friends went back to Mexico," Mr. Segovia said, "and I am thinking of going, too, if it doesn't get better here."
Michael Francis, who grows several crops near here, said that he requested and kept documentation that his 150 employees were eligible to work, but that some had left and he was having difficulty filling the jobs. "The people from the office buildings in Phoenix are not going to swarm the countryside to clip onions," Mr. Francis said. "There are just not a lot of people knocking on the door to do this kind of work."
Groups representing the state's 150,000 licensed businesses say the wording of the law is vague and has led to confusion over whether it applies to all employees or only those hired after Jan. 1. The bill's sponsor, Representative Russell Pearce, Republican of Mesa, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the law applied to all employees, not just new hires.
As a result of the confusion, employers have scrambled to compile and check paperwork, and a cottage industry of law forums and consulting is emerging.
"The legal costs of being investigated and prosecuted based on claims with little or no merit could be substantial," said Glenn Hamer, the president of the state Chamber of Commerce, one of the groups suing to block the law. "This could lead to fishing expeditions and will burden county attorneys from other priorities like investigating murder, rape, child molestation."
Arizona's law stands out.
The law calls for suspending a business license for at least 10 days on the first offense and revoking it for a second one, effectively shutting down the business. Several states call for pulling a business license after the federal government has determined that an employer hired illegal workers, but Arizona's law empowers the state to act alone.
Although it is already a federal offense to hire illegal workers, the law's authors contend that more illegal workers will be found because it requires the state's 15 county attorneys to investigate any complaint they deem not frivolous.
"That's the problem," said Julie A. Pace, a lawyer representing business and advocate groups opposed to the law. "This is the federal government's authority, not the state's."
But backers of the law say the state's power to grant business licenses includes the authority to set the criteria for them.
The county attorneys have not taken a position on the law as a group, but they have worked toward developing a uniform process to file and weigh complaints.
Ms. Napolitano called the law flawed, but signed it anyway, saying it was better than risking a possible ballot measure that could be "even more draconian" and difficult to overturn. "It was left up to Arizona because the federal government has failed to act," she said.
Ms. Napolitano signed the legislation a few days after a Congressional effort to revamp immigration laws failed, with one of its key sponsors, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, a presidential candidate, predicting a confusing hodgepodge of state laws. Mr. McCain's campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the state law Thursday night.
Jim Weiers, a Republican and the speaker of the Arizona House, said an ad hoc group was preparing recommendations on what if any changes to make to the law. But Mr. Weiers stood by it, suggesting that if the anecdotal reports of its early impact were true, so much the better.
"If all this is happening then the law, before it has taken effect, is working," he said. "The whole idea was to make sure we are not going to be a place people come to illegally to start a better life."
Some businesses contend that the difficulties of verifying legal employment have been exaggerated and that the law will eventually improve competition in the marketplace if cheap, foreign labor is cut.
"We are out competing against businesses using illegal labor and not registered as contractors," said Gary Hudder, an asphalt paving contractor who is president of the Yavapai County Contractors Association in Prescott, which, in contrast to the state contractors association, supports the law. "This will level the playing field," Mr. Hudder said.
Still, economists say the law could damage the economy.
"If you take 12 percent of the work force away, that is going to be a problem," said Dawn McLaren, an economist at Arizona State University, adding that people not currently working could never make up the difference. "The largest group to join the work force was during World War II, and that was a big motivator. I don't think patriotism is going to drive this one."
Some business owners said they worried that they would unfairly be singled out by disgruntled employees or people who assume many Spanish-speaking workers are illegal.
"We have had U.S. citizens give us false documents because law enforcement was against them for whatever reason," said Saul Perez, who manages a construction company here. "This is not necessarily going to catch as many undocumented workers as people believe."
All of the state's businesses will be required to use the Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify system, a pilot program that electronically checks Social Security and other records to confirm legal employment status. An outside auditor for the department warned this year that naturalized citizens were more likely to be incorrectly flagged as unauthorized to work than American-born workers, but a department spokeswoman said that the overall error rate was "extremely low" and that improvements were continuing.
Illinois, which had adopted a law barring use of E-Verify over accuracy concerns, agreed Thursday not to enforce it until a lawsuit filed by the Homeland Security Department was resolved. The state said it would consider amending the law to address the federal government's concerns.
Lives Are Growing Harder, Hispanics Say in Survey
By Julia Preston
The New York Times
Friday 14 December 2007
After a year of stepped-up enforcement against illegal immigration and polarized debate on the issue, about half of the Hispanics in the United States now fear that they or a relative or close friend could be deported, a report released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center found.
About two-thirds of Hispanics said their lives had been made more difficult by the political fight over immigration and the failure of Congress to address the situation of illegal immigrants, the Pew survey found. Roughly half the Hispanics in the poll said the heightened attention to immigration had had a directly negative impact on them, in some cases making it harder for them to find jobs or housing.
Some 41 percent of Hispanics said they or someone close to them had had a personal experience of discrimination in the past five years, an increase of 10 percent since 2002 of Hispanics' reporting such experiences, the survey found.
Yet despite their worries about the political climate, almost three-quarters of Hispanics are happy with their lives, the survey found, and they are overwhelmingly optimistic that their children will be more successful than they have been.
The findings came in the annual survey of Hispanics by the Pew center, a nonpartisan organization in Washington that is a leading source of demographic and opinion research on Latinos in this country. The study included Hispanics born in the United States and immigrants born in other countries.
The survey did not include questions about the legal status of the immigrants who responded. Based on census data, Pew researchers have estimated that about one-quarter of all Hispanics are illegal immigrants.
Some 47 million Hispanics in the United States are the nation's largest minority, making up about 15 percent of the population. They are a fast-growing group among voters. Almost one million Latino immigrants applied in the past year to become naturalized citizens, many with the hope of voting in the 2008 presidential election.
The study indicated that the increase in high-profile immigration raids at workplaces and in immigrant communities over the past year has had a strong echo effect among Hispanics across the country. Two-thirds of Hispanic immigrants said they worried about the possibility of a deportation hurting their family. Strikingly, even among Latinos who are United States citizens and so run no risk of being deported, about one-third said they feared it could happen to a relative or friend.
"It suggests that Latinos in this country are part of extended families and communities living in a political and policy climate where this concern is part of their lives," Paul Taylor, the acting director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said in a conference call to discuss the survey.
About 12 percent of Hispanics in the survey said they had faced difficulties finding or keeping a job as a result of the public clamor over immigration, and 15 percent said they had had a harder time finding housing. About one-fifth said they had been asked more frequently in the past year to show documents to prove their immigration status.
While about half of non-Hispanics in the country favor the crackdown, Hispanics strongly oppose it, the study found. Three-quarters of Latinos disapprove of raids at job sites, while 51 percent of non-Hispanics approve. Latinos most vigorously oppose cooperation between federal immigration agents and local police officers, with 79 percent opposing those measures.
Fifty-five percent of Hispanics said they opposed immigration status checks during the application process for driver's licenses. By contrast, 85 percent of non-Hispanics said immigration status should be checked during the licensing process. Non-Hispanics were polled in a separate Pew survey.
The survey's conclusions resonated with Hispanics in different regions consulted by telephone Thursday. Narciso Camarillo, 37, a naturalized citizen born in Mexico who owns a pizza parlor in the Bronx, said he knew three illegal immigrants in his immediate social circle who feared deportation.
"Every day I wonder what will happen to them tomorrow," Mr. Camarillo said. The authorities "are coming down more and more on the immigrants," he said.
Maria Covarrubias, 62, another Mexican immigrant who has gained American citizenship, said she was dismayed by how Mexicans had been portrayed in news reports and the televised presidential debates.
"They say we are drunks and bad people, but they could not live without us," said Mrs. Covarrubias, who came to the United States 12 years ago and lives in Sacramento. "The politicians want our vote, but they don't want us."
The worries are shared by some native-born Hispanics. "Even people who have been here for 20 years are afraid to go out," said Patricia Pineda, 19, who was born in Torrance, Calif., and now lives near Los Angeles. Ms. Pineda said she was registering to vote to support a presidential candidate who would offer legal alternatives to illegal immigrants.
Despite their concerns about the current atmosphere, about 71 percent of Hispanics surveyed described the overall quality of their lives as good or excellent. More than three-quarters said they were confident that their children would grow up to have better-paying jobs than theirs.
The survey was conducted by telephone from Oct. 3 through Nov. 9 with a sample of 2,003 Hispanic adults, with a sampling margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
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