The immigration-reform bill was supposed to seal the border by denying jobs to undocumented workers. It hasn't delivered

It was hailed as the antidote for illegal immigration: A bipartisan plan that would finally halt the flood of undocumented aliens across U.S. borders by eliminating the biggest lure-plentiful jobs. Yet now, after only 18 months, critics are calling the heralded Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 the biggest flop since Prohibition. That may be premature, but it's clear the law is floundering.

In the first four months of 1988, more than 400,000 illegals were apprehended along the southern border, a 13 percent increase over the same period in 1987. Administration officials and legislators had predicted that immigration reform would stem that northbound tide by providing a program of stiff fines for employers who knowingly hire illegals. But loopholes in the law, cautious enforcement and a daunting numerical mismatch between INS agents and work-hungry illegals have crippled the fledgling employersanctions program. Even avid supporters of the immigration overhaul, such as Roger Conner of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), are worried. "The illegals are coming because there are still jobs here-there is just no way around that," says Conner"If employer sanctions get subverted, immigration reform goes down as a fraud."

That picture is radically different from the one that prevailed last year when the law went into effect. Border apprehensions during 1987 plummeted by roughly a third as exaggerated rumors of mass deportations and firings deterred Mexican workers from coming north for months. The influx resumed, in part, because the Immigration and Naturalization Service spent the last year teaching employers about the sanctions, rather than enforcing them. But that emphasis will change on June 1, when serious enforcement will begin. The other part of the reform law, amnesty for certain illegal aliens, ended on May 4.

Playing Simon-Says. Seeking to encourage voluntary compliance, INS agents contacted more than 800,000 employers. However, they gave warning citations to only 2,200 employers and fined a mere 100 businesses. That is a minute fraction of all potential violators: In 1986, an estimated 4 million illegals resided in the U.S., working for as many as400,000 different employers.

The INS won kudos from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others for its educational work with businesses, but playing Simon-Says with employers has not ensured widespread employer compliance. Since only a small number of flagrant offenders have so far received fines, many employers-particularly small businesses-have had little financial incentive to reform their hiring practices.

All businesses, except certain agricultural growers, must now have an I-9 form for each worker hired after Nov. 6, 1986, showing that the boss has checked an employe's passport, birth certificate or other documents to verify his or her legal status to work. However, officials at the Labor Department say that only 41 percent of the 15,000 employers whose records they checked from September, 1987, to April of this year had filled out 1-9s properly. Thirty percent hadn't collected the simple one-page form from any new hire. "We don't know why many employers are out of compliance," says John Fraser, a Labor Department official. "It could be a lack of information, an inability to comply with the requirements-or an unwillingness to do so."

Predictably, the most unwilling are bosses that historically hired illegal labor. One landscape contractor in the Los Angeles area who requested anonymity acknowledged that a third of his 150man work force is still illegal. He advertised for legal workers but found that only "the white guys read the want ads, and when they find out we're offering $5 or $6 per hour, they don't show up." When legal workers do take his backbreaking gardening jobs, they soon quit. "A 20-year-old white guy can go home and live with Mom and Dad," he says. "The Mexican worker may have two or three kids back home who he's sending money to."

Surprisingly, even employers who do comply with the immigration law may still be hiring illegals. That's because em ployers are not responsible for verifying the authenticity of documents new workers show (or for keeping

copies). There are 17 different types of documents that applicants can use to establish work eligibility, and they come in more than a thousand variations. "The current system of identifiers," writes Malcolm Lovell Jr., a former Reagan administration official who now teaches at George Washington University, "is an invitation to widespread abuse and a defense for illintentioned employers." In some industries in the Southwest, bogus documents, which range in price from $10 to $600, are already proliferating. Partial results from a field survey of some 400 immigrant workers by Prof Wayne Cornelius and his colleagues at the Center for U.S.Mexican Studies at the University of California at San Diego show a quarter of the undocumented workers have already purchased fake documents.

Didn't kick down doors. Yet while it's easy to second-guess the INS's go-slow strategy, it's not clear the agency had much choice. The 1,950-mile U.S.-Mexican border rules out a Berlin Wall remedy for illegal immigration, and with nearly 60 percent of Mexico's labor force unemployed or underemployed, the northward push to find work is inevitable for the foreseeable future.

Moreover, the sheer number of illegals already in the U.S. makes voluntary compliance by employers imperative. The General Accounting Office reports that federal agents plan to cheek the 1-9 forms of 80,000 businesses during this fiscal year-about 1 percent of the nation's 7 million employers. "We could have started kicking down doors early," says INS Commissioner Alan Nelson, "but you can't run an effective sanction program unless you have the support of the public and employers." Nelson and other INS officials acknowledge that thousands of illegals still enter the U.S. every day, but they point out that fewer illegals are entering the U.S. than in 1986, when border crossings were at an all-time high.

In coming months, sanctions should show more bite, because after June 1, the INS no longer has to issue warning citations to first-time offenders. Instead, they can immediately fine employers who either hire illegals or fail to have appropriate 1-9s in place. INS officials plan to concentrate on those who knowingly hire illegals, levying fines from $250 to $10,000 per illegal for repeat violators.

It's doubtful that the INS's plan to gradually increase employer fines will ever completely halt illegals from coming. But it is likely that sanctions will shift the employment prospects for illegals away from large corporations into less tightly regulated day-labor jobs in agriculture, gardening and construction. Professor Cornelius's study shows that illegals are already moving in this direction in parts of Southern California, even though the jobs typically pay poorly and have no health insurance. An employer-sanctions crackdown, he warns, ironically could create "the kind of permanent underclass of illegal aliens that proponents of the 1986 law claimed it would eliminate."

COPYRIGHT 1988 All rights reserved.

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