NYT: A Foolish Immigration Purge (17.8 million born here could be fired for bad S S record keeping)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/opinion/27thu2.html?_r=4&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Editorial

Published: March 27, 2008

Leave it to the Bush administration to throw thousands of law-abiding American workers and companies off a cliff in perilous economic times.

That would be the effect of its decision to press ahead with a bad idea: to force businesses to fire employees whose names don’t match the Social Security database. The purge is part of a campaign — along with scattershot workplace raids and the partial border fence — to make a show of tackling the broken immigration system.

The plan rests on the assumption that people with Social Security glitches are illegal immigrants using fake identities. Companies that receive “no match” letters warning of database discrepancies are given 90 days to clear them up. After that, they must fire the affected workers or face stiff penalties.

A federal judge blocked the plan last year, warning that it would create havoc in the economy and lead to serious due-process violations for victims of clerical errors. The Social Security Administration’s inspector general has estimated that about 17.8 million of the agency’s 435 million records contain errors that could lead to a “no match” letter. Seventy percent of those 17.8 million records belong to native-born Americans.

The Department of Homeland Security responded to the judge’s objections by resubmitting its proposal last week essentially unchanged. Americans anxious about keeping their jobs should raise a stink and hope that the court rebuffs the agency again.

FULL story at link.