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In fact, relatively few illegal immigrants are rounded up at workplaces these days. With the economy booming--at least until very recently--and with unemployment down, the motivation for raids has declined; undocumented workers are performing tasks no one else will take on. The Immigration and Naturalization Service spends most of its money patrolling the border. Inside the U.S., enforcement is shifting from factory busts to deportation of criminal aliens. The INS could catch illegals by closely examining their false Social Security numbers and IDs, be they borrowed, stolen or invented. But the agency doesn't have the manpower, and the IRS and Social Security Administration won't cooperate on privacy grounds.
And when the INS does try to enforce the law in the workplace, it can incur powerful opposition. Take Operation Vanguard, launched in September 1998 to target the undocumented workers on whom the Nebraska meat-packing industry relies. The agency subpoenaed the records of slaughterhouses and informed the factories that it would interview 4,762 employees--a fifth of the state's meat packers--about discrepancies in their documents.
Illegal workers, predictably, fled before the INS showed up, and factory owners, facing a labor shortage, squawked. With ranchers claiming a loss to the state's economy of $20 million over eight months, local politicians attacked the operation, and the INS backed down. A task force appointed by Governor Mike Johanns endorsed a broad amnesty for undocumented workers, and a year and a half passed before INS agents showed up again. Last month they raided Nebraska Beef in Omaha, charged managers with criminal smuggling and expelled 212 Mexican aliens. Within two weeks, though, the workers were trickling back.
The threat of an INS bust has become a weapon in the arsenal of antiunion employers. When undocumented Latina chambermaids at the Holiday Inn Express in Minneapolis, Minn., voted to join the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union last year, management called in the INS, and they were hauled off to jail. But the union posted their bonds, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission launched an investigation, and the hotel agreed to pay a $72,000 settlement. The INS, which had at first threatened to deport the illegal maids, agreed to let seven of the eight remain in the U.S. "Companies across America love illegal aliens until they get uppity and ask for a few more cents," said Michael Moore, the activist filmmaker, who used an Internet appeal to pressure the INS for leniency in the case.
More often, employer threats to call in the INS have a chilling effect on organizing. The Smithfield Packing Co. in Tar Heel, N.C., the world's largest pork-processing plant, fought off a 1997 union drive by firing labor activists and calling in sheriff's deputies to patrol the parking lot on election day--an intimidating sight to undocumented employees. Last month, in a case brought by the union to the National Labor Relations Board, a judge found that Smithfield managers had committed "egregious and pervasive" labor-law violations by claiming that the union would turn employees in to the INS. The judge ordered a new election, but the company says it will appeal.