Obama Administration Plans To Intensify Crack Down On Employers Who Hire Undocumented Workers

The Wall Street Journal has a story up today on the White House's announcement that they will begin to aggressively audit businesses I-9 forms to see if they are hiring undocumented immigrants. If they are found to be in violation of these laws, they will be fined and the immigrants found will be deported.

Miriam Jordan has the full story here, John Morton Chief of the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement announced that the Department of Homeland Security will be creating a center which will administer these audits.:

In an interview, John Morton, chief of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, said the Employment Compliance Inspection Center would "address a need to conduct audits even of the largest employers with a very large number of employees." The office would be announced Thursday, he said.

This is significant in a couple of ways, first this type of audit is the exact opposite of the type of splashy raids conducted by the Bush Administration. In a way it is far more effective. The Bush Administration would conduct raids which would inevitably end up on television and would give the impression that they were tough on enforcement issues.  The reality is those types of raids were not very efficient, the sheer man power of raiding work site, by work site is huge, and time consuming.  Not to mention they were not humane in any sense of the word... By contrast, a centralized office, designed to do nothing else but audit people could cover far more businesses. Audits under the Obama administration have sky rocketed:

In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2010, ICE conducted audits of more than 2,740 companies, nearly twice as many as the previous year. The agency levied a record $7 million in civil fines on businesses that employed illegal workers.

Contrast this with the Bush Administration and the difference is apparent:

Enforcement activity during the Bush administration focused on high-profile raids in which thousands of illegal immigrants were arrested and placed in deportation proceedings. Relatively few companies and their executives were prosecuted.  In contrast, the Obama administration has made employers the center of its immigration policy with "silent raids." Critics say the policy has penalized small employers while failing to target larger employers

In the new Congress, often you will hear Republican members of the House Judiciary Sub Committee on Immigration complain that the Obama administrtation is not tough enough on enforcement. The data clearly shows that not only are they tough on enforcement but that they are effecient. Which is not something that can be said about the last President in office. Nor can it be said about the enforcement policies of the GOP controlled Congress for the six years when they controlled both chambers. This is not  partisan sniping it is more to point out that for all the politicized complaining about security, over the last three years of the current admnistration there has been a healthy emphasis on security and enforcement laws. At this point if the GOP was serious about solving the problems associated with immigration they would stop pointing fingers and start legislating on a more comprehensive solution.