The New Plan for Immigration Raids
by David Bacon t r u t h o u t
Oakland, California - A year ago, in the middle of the nation’s most bitterly fought union organizing drive, management at the Smithfield Foods pork slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, sent a letter to 300 workers. The company, Smithfield claimed, had been notified by the Social Security Administration that the workers’ numbers didn’t match the SSA database. Come up with new numbers, the company ordered, that could pass the “no-match check,” or they’d be fired within two weeks.
The Smithfield plant, largest of its kind in the world, employs 5,000 people, about half of them immigrants. No one can say for sure how many lacked immigration papers, but as in most meatpacking plants, many undoubtedly did. Despite their status, during the prior year those workers had walked out twice to join immigrant rights marches. They even shut down production lines over the high accident rate. The fear created by the no-match check was an easy way to cut that activism short.
For the last two decades, employers have threatened, and often implemented, similar terminations in workplace after workplace. At the Woodfin Suites in Emeryville, California, the hotel threatened no- match firings after workers began demanding compliance with the city’s living wage law. At the Cintas Laundry chain, plant mangers fired hundreds of employees last year in no-match checks during UNITE HERE’s national organizing drive. The list goes on and on.
Now the Bush administration says that vastly increased checks will become a fact of life in every US workplace. On August 10, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters that SSA will soon send letters to all sizable employers, listing all workers whose numbers don’t jibe. After a ninety-day grace period, the administration will require employers to discharge those whose numbers are still in question.
The scope of Chertoff’s order is staggering. About 12 million people living in the US have no legal immigration status. Most of them work. In order to get hired, they have to present a Social Security number to their employer. Some use invented numbers, while others borrow existing numbers that belong to someone else. This causes no harm to others - if anything, it subsidizes the Social Security fund, since undocumented workers can’t claim benefits, although they’re paying deductions like everyone else.
Yet if the Chertoff regulation is implemented as announced, as many as eight or nine million people will lose their jobs at the end of this year.
Merry Christmas. You’re fired.
The impact will be catastrophic. Most undocumented families live close to the margin as it is, from paycheck to paycheck. They would suddenly have no means to buy food, pay rent, clothe their children or send them to school. The human suffering would be immense. [more]