This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Federal officials wanted to send a message to Utah employers who deliberately look the other way when they hire undocumented workers. If you do the crime, you will pay.
That's fine as far as it goes. Federal officers must enforce the law, as they did in Thursday's raid on Universal Industrial Sales, Inc., in Lindon.
But there's a much more important message to be taken from the raid. U.S. immigration law remains broken, completely out of touch with economic and humanitarian reality. Until Congress repairs it, providing a legal way for the millions of temporary and permanent immigrant workers critical to the U.S. economy to enter the country and labor here, injustice and suffering will be the fruits of enforcement.
President Bush and a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators worked for months last year to craft a reform package that would have strengthened border control, expanded capacity for guest workers and provided a process toward legal permanent residency for the estimated 12 million aliens living in violation of immigration law in the United States today. Unfortunately, it was defeated in a wave of populist fear and nativism.
Of course, the problems it was designed to fix did not go away, and immigration reform must be a top priority for the next president and Congress.
The Lindon raid shows why.
As it was carried out, a federal court unsealed indictments charging the company with 10 counts of harboring illegal aliens, and its human resources director with two counts of inducing undocumented workers to remain in the United States illegally.
Without knowing the evidence that underlies these charges, it is impossible to judge whether they are justified. Clearly, employers should make every effort to comply with the law, and authorities should not tolerate employers who deliberately suspend disbelief when they are given Social Security cards or other documents that are obvious fakes. Some business owners look the other way in order to exploit cheap immigrant labor.
But honest employers often are caught in a jam because there is no reliable and efficient way to verify Social Security numbers. Documents are easily forged.
Immigrant workers suffer because this country lures them here with jobs, but provides only a grossly inadequate pipeline for them to work here legally, forcing many of them to live in the shadows.
Congress cannot repeal the law of supply and demand, nor the human need to provide for a family. In an international labor market, everyone is a migrant worker.
Until U.S. law reflects that, it will continue to be unrealistic, unjust and unenforceable.