30 people arrested in raids by US immigration officials By Mac Daniel, Globe Staff | March 8, 2006 Federal immigration officials yesterday announced the arrests of 30 undocumented immigrants, including 26 who allegedly failed to obey federal orders to leave the country. The arrests, which occurred Monday morning, were part of a coordinated sweep through Revere, Malden, Chelsea, Everett, and East Boston, officials said. None of those arrested were found to have ties to terrorism. Some of those arrested have been running from the law for 15 years, officials said. Advocates for Boston's immigrant communities said the sweep achieved little and only helped create fear in New England's immigrant communities. Officials with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said those arrested were from Algeria, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Morocco, Honduras, and Togo. Federal immigration officials can't say with certainty how many immigrants have been ordered to leave the country but still remain in the Boston region. But Bruce E. Chadbourne, director of the New England field office of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that there could be between 5,000 and 6,000, depending on how many of the fugitives under deportation orders have left the region and how many have relocated to Boston or New England from elsewhere. In a raid two years ago, immigration agents swept up undocumented immigrants with violent criminal records, prompting Chadbourne to state in a news release yesterday that ''we remove violent criminals who pose a threat to public safety from our communities." In an interview, however, he said the worst crimes in Monday's sweep were motor vehicle violations. Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said the latest raids were ''yet another instance of ICE going after low-hanging fruit." ''There's some validity that they're out of status and they have not obeyed orders. But the overarching issue . . . is I'm not sure that Greater Boston is any safer after the people were picked up yesterday. I think I would rather see those dollars spent on finding terrorists and making sure our country is safer," he said. Since last October, 472 fugitive illegal immigrants have been arrested in the New England field office's jurisdiction, officials said. Twenty of this week's arrests occurred in Revere, and 19 of them are fugitive immigrants who were previously ordered to leave the country. Chadbourne said Revere's role in the sweep was more luck than a trend. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is one of three new bureaus of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, working under the US Department of Homeland Security. Cherylann Tranfaglia, 20, of East Boston, witnessed one of the arrests after agents knocked on her front door and arrested her boyfriend, Tony Martinez, 20, of Honduras. Tranfaglia said agents rifled through her belongings and refused to tell her why Martinez was being arrested around 7 a.m. Monday. She also said her boyfriend has a residency card, but she could not say with certainty if he is in the country legally. ''I grew up with these kids, we went to middle school and high school together, and they're not gang members," she said. ''And now they're doing the right thing and staying at home, some with their babies." Mac Daniel can be reached at mdaniel@globe.com. ---------------------------------------------- Illegal workers hold 1 of 20 civilian jobs, research says Study finds as many as 12 million immigrants may be in U.S. unlawfully By GEBE MARTINEZ Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - As many as 12 million illegal immigrants now live in the United States, up from an estimated 8.4 million in the 2000 Census, according to a new study released Tuesday. The estimate by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center also said that illegal workers fill nearly one out of every 20 civilian jobs. They hold 24 percent of all jobs in farming, 17 percent in cleaning, 14 percent in construction and 12 percent in food preparation. The population and work force estimates were released a day before the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to debate legislation that would tighten borders to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. The highly charged political issue centers on how to deal with immigrants already in the country illegally and whether to create temporary visas for future workers. "In spite of efforts to control unauthorized migration, the numbers have continued to grow," said Jeffrey Passel, author of the report. "This is a population drawn (to the United States) by employment, and unauthorized workers participate actively in the labor force." Children a factor The number of illegal immigrants is 11.5 million to 12 million, up from the 11.1 million estimate of a year ago, according to the Pew study. Of the total, 7.2 million were employed in March 2005, making up about 4.9 percent of the civilian labor force. While 94 percent of men illegally in the country hold jobs, undocumented women are less likely to hold jobs than legal or native-born workers, largely because of the presence of children in their families, the study said. About 3.1 million children, or two-thirds of all the children in families that include illegal immigrants, were born in the United States and are citizens. The high number of children born here to illegal immigrants is used by advocates of tighter controls as an argument against issuing temporary worker visas. "It highlights how false the label of 'temporary worker' is," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. With illegal immigrant families taking root in the United States, he said, "it's hard to deport people." Immigrant rights advocate Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, said it is perplexing that opponents want "to deny that there's a place for these workers in our society." Business interests The Pew report added fuel to the debate about whether illegal immigrants are doing jobs refused by U.S. citizens or legal immigrants. Krikorian said that if illegal immigrants make up 17 percent of those in the cleaning occupations, for example, "that means that 83 percent are Americans or legal immigrants. Where are the jobs that Americans won't do?" Business interests especially want new "guest worker" visas and legal status for immigrants already here because, they say, the economy needs the immigrants who are filling unwanted jobs. "There's an inadequate number of U.S.-born workers doing those jobs, which is why undocumented workers are doing them," Kelley said. The Judiciary Committee will consider a proposal by its chairman, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., that would allow illegal immigrants who were in the country and working before Jan. 4, 2004, to remain here if they stay employed and do not commit crimes. But they would have to return to their home countries if they want to apply for citizenship or if they are out of work for longer than 45 days. Some say they oppose Specter's idea because they say it amounts to amnesty, and some immigrant-rights groups say it would treat immigrants as substandard workers. gebe.martinez@chron.com --------------------------------------------- Economic View The Search for Illegal Immigrants Stops at the Workplace By EDUARDO PORTER March 5, 2006 IT may seem that the United States government has declared all-out war against illegal immigration. During the last decade, the budget dedicated to enforcement of immigration laws has grown by leaps and bounds. The Border Patrol has about three times as many agents as it did in the early 1990's, and the southern border has been laced with high-tech surveillance gadgetry. Yet a closer look reveals a very different portrait of immigration policy. It seems designed for failure. Most experts agree that a vast majority of illegal immigrants who make it across the border every year are seeking work. But the workplace is the one spot that is virtually unpoliced. "What we've done is put a lot of people on the line of scrimmage, but when you do that the other side can just lob a little pass and score a touchdown," said Richard M. Stana, director of homeland security and justice issues at the Government Accountability Office. "Trying to get a better balance between border enforcement and interior enforcement would go a long way." In a strategy document in 1999, the Immigration and Naturalization Service put monitoring the workplace last among its five enforcement priorities. Today, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has replaced the I.N.S. and is a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, devotes about 4 percent of its personnel to enforcement in the workplace, down from 9 percent in 1999. Demographers estimate that six million to seven million illegal immigrants are working in the United States; that is some 5 percent of the nation's work force. Yet in 2004, the latest year for which there is data, the immigration authorities issued penalty notices to only three companies. The current approach hasn't halted illegal immigration: some 400,000 to 500,000 illegal immigrants enter the United States every year, almost double the rate of the 1980's, before the buildup in border enforcement. Regardless of whether the United States ought to have more or less immigration, the nation's policy must be flawed when almost half of all immigrants come in illegally. Indeed, some experts argue that the basic reason illegal immigration hasn't stopped is that the country doesn't want it to. Gordon H. Hanson, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, said the ineffective approach was the product of a collection of interests. "Employers feel very strongly about maintaining access to immigrant workers, and exert political pressure to prevent enforcement from being effective," Professor Hanson said. "While there are lots of groups concerned about immigration on the other side" of the argument, "it's not like their livelihood depends on this." Employers have long been the main driver of immigration policy, Professor Hanson said. Not surprisingly, they tend to dislike the provision in current immigration law for penalties against employers. That may explain why fines for hiring illegal immigrants can be as low as $275 a worker, and immigration officials acknowledge that businesses often negotiate fines downward. And why, after the I.N.S. raided onion fields in Georgia during the 1998 harvest, a senator and four members of the House of Representatives from the state sharply criticized the agency for hurting Georgia farmers. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, the government limited immigration enforcement in the workplace to what it deemed "critical infrastructure" --- places like nuclear power plants and airports --- that could be vulnerable to terrorism. Even in the late 1990's when the economy was booming and labor markets were tight, the I.N.S. virtually stopped looking for illegal immigrants in the workplace. Employers might not favor a guest worker program to allow immigrants to work here legally, if such a program included harsher policing of the workplace. "A guest worker program would offer secure legal access to immigrant labor, but at the risk that this labor would come in smaller quantities or with more strings attached," Professor Hanson said. The immigration law of 1986 contained a basic flaw. Congress barred employers from hiring illegal immigrants, but it didn't provide a reliable way for employers to check an immigrant's status. For less than $50, immigrants can buy a set of fake documents --- usually a Social Security card and green card, indicating permanent residency --- to get a job. The fake ID's provide employers with crucial protection in the eyes of the law: companies can plausibly deny that they knew they were hiring people without legal permission to work. The upshot is that millions of illegal immigrants work on the books, with the odd side effect that the Social Security Administration receives millions of Form W2 wage reports from employers that bear random Social Security numbers. In 1996 the inspector general of the Justice Department warned that fraudulent documents were allowing unscrupulous employers to avoid accountability for hiring illegal immigrants. If the government decided to halt, or at least substantially dent, the flow of these immigrants into the work force, it would find that it probably already has the tools. Since 1997, immigration authorities and the Social Security Administration have been running a voluntary pilot program that allows employers to check worker documentation on the spot --- matching documents against government databases over the Internet. This system could end employers' deniability, because they could determine quickly whether a given employee was authorized to work in the United States. That's probably why so few companies have signed up: only about 2,300 of the more than six million employers across the country. EVEN if such a system became mandatory, people might continue to hire illegal immigrants as nannies and housekeepers, and to pay them in cash. Small businesses operating under the radar might also hire them off the books. Yet many illegal immigrants work on the books. For employers, it is one thing to fail to question the dubious provenance of Social Security cards. It is quite another to overtly break the law. Ramping up the pilot program into a mandatory national one would be costly. The Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration would have to make their databases compatible. Glitches --- such as different spellings for the same name --- would have to be ironed out. But these difficulties do not seem insurmountable, especially when set against the Department of Homeland Security's enormous and utterly ineffective effort to stop illegal immigration at the border. So why hasn't workplace enforcement increased? "It's an open question," said Mr. Stana of the G.A.O. "Have we turned a blind eye to this in the interest of keeping the economy humming?"