Vol. 75/No. 44      December 5, 2011

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently announced that over the last year it conducted 2,496 immigration audits, five times more than in 2008.

The I-9 audits, referring to forms workers fill out when hired, are sometimes called “silent raids” because they lead to immigrants being fired instead of arrested and deported in higher profile factory raids by armed ICE agents.

ICE says that it fined 385 employers for various infractions, but did not release figures for how many workers were fired as a result of the audits. Escondido Disposal in southern California fired 50 of its 200 employees in July and August after an ICE audit said they lacked needed documents.

According to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, more than 292,000 companies at 898,000 worksites use E-Verify to check employees’ immigration and work status. They did so 17.4 million times last year. More than 1,000 companies join the program each week, she said.

ICE has also been expanding the so-called Secure Communities program, now in place in 1,595 jurisdictions, which checks the fingerprints of everyone in jail with a Homeland Security database looking for people to deport.

A big part of the government’s effort is to give the impression that its programs are fighting crime by prioritizing the arrest of “criminal aliens.”

Napolitano brags that over the past year ICE carried out a record 396,906 “removals,” where those deported face the possibility of felony charges if they return to the U.S. She said that 55 percent of these deportations were of immigrants previously convicted of crimes, mostly drug and alcohol offenses.

And there are more than 18,000 Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border, Napolitano said, more than twice the number stationed there in 2004.

The tightening of the border, increased penalties and risks of being detained or fired, and the deepening economic crisis have reduced the number of undocumented workers attempting to cross the southwestern border by at least two-thirds, according to the Homeland Security secretary.

In an October 29 editorial titled “The Other Jobs Crisis,” the Wall Street Journal blamed the immigration crackdown for “leaving unfilled tens of thousands of jobs that few Americans seem to want,” noting that “most of the 1.6 million agricultural laborers in America are Hispanic, and a majority of them are assumed to be undocumented immigrants.”

Recent laws targeting undocumented workers in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and other states, which build on existing federal law, have heightened uncertainty among immigrants, some of whom have moved to other states. Thousands of immigrant workers held a one-day strike in Alabama October 12 protesting that state’s new anti-immigrant measures.

Capitalist farmers are looking for other sources of “cheap” labor with the aid of prison authorities in several states. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal pushed prisoners released on probation to work on vegetable farms when agribusinesses complained that since the law passed crops were rotting in the fields. Many quit after a short stint.

Idaho prisons have profited off inmate labor in the fields for more than a decade. The Arizona Department of Corrections has one of the more “successful” programs, paying prisoners barely 60 percent of what other farmworkers get. Prisoners put in 1.3 million hours working for five capitalist farmers during the 2011 fiscal year, a 30 percent increase over 2010.

But many agribusiness owners are skeptical that this can solve their problems. They want Washington to expand “guest worker” programs. Although guest workers have a few more tenuous rights than undocumented immigrants, they can be deported if they are fired, quit, or go on strike.
 
 
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Alabama immigrant rights marchers: ‘We’re not leaving’
Chicago immigrant rights speakout slams Ala. arrests  
 
 
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