Immigration battle: Time to speak up

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(Washington, D.C.) -- Small business owners will have an opportunity to sound off about "no match" immigration rules that force employers to face heavy fines for not verifying workers' immigration status within 90 days if social security numbers didn't match.

On Friday, Federal Judge Charles Breyer agreed with a complaint that the Department of Homeland Security had not considered how onerous the rules are for businesses, and gave the DHS until March 24, 2008, to survey small business owners and get their take on how the illegal immigration rules affects them.

An odd coalition of lobbying groups from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Chamber of Commerce brought the issue to court by challenging the crackdown, saying that DHS rules placed too high a burden on businesses, and on Oct. 10 Breyer suspended those rules. (Full story.) In his four-page ruling, he found the Social Security Administration database had so many errors that thousands of American citizens and legal immigrants would have been fired. Small businesses are more likely to fire workers because they often lack the resources to go through the complicated verification process.

Since August the SSA has sent companies 141,000 "no match" letters covering 8 million workers. The letters were giving businesses instructions on how to handle the issue. In his October ruling, Breyer also halted those letters saying that the government did not follow proper procedures in implementing the rules.

The groups that filed the suit won't be happy until the department drops the rules all together.

"The DHS is continuing down this disastrous path of punishing citizens and legal workers by using the fatally-flawed database," said Lucas Guttentag, Director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project in a statement. "The DHS should finally abandon this illegal approach instead of repeating the same mistake."

But if the DHS has its way those groups are out of luck.

The Bush Administration has been adamant about immigration reform and has no plans to let the issue drop anytime soon. The DHS says they'll survey business owners as required, but claim they'll also rewrite the rules by the March deadline to address the judge's objections.

The court "got it wrong," says DHS spokesperson Laura Keehner. "However, DHS is planning to provide an answer to the small number of minor issues that the judge raised in his opinion," says Keehner. "This should allow the government to move forward with the rule."