WASHINGTON — A federal judge barred the Bush administration Wednesday from launching a planned crackdown on U.S. firms that hire illegal immigrants, warning of the plan’s potentially “staggering” effect on law-abiding workers and companies.
Issuing a firm rebuke of the White House, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction against the government’s plan to pressure employers to fire up to 8.7 million workers with suspect Social Security numbers starting this fall.
President Bush made that plan the centerpiece of a re-energized enforcement effort against illegal immigration after the Senate rejected his proposed legislation to overhaul immigration laws this summer. But the ruling, made at the behest of major American labor, business and farm organizations, highlighted the chasm that the immigration fight has opened between the Republican Party and its traditional business allies.
The ruling also called attention to the gulf between Washington politicians’ rhetoric about the need to curtail illegal immigration and the economic reality of many U.S. employers’ reliance on illegal labor, as well as to the government’s inability to find adequate tools for identifying illegal workers.
Breyer said the plaintiffs, an unusual coalition that included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union, had raised such serious questions about the plan to mail Social Security “no-match” letters to 140,000 U.S. employers that it should be blocked from proceeding.
“There can be no doubt that the effects of the rule’s implementation will be severe,” Breyer wrote, resulting in “irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers.”
The government letters were intended to warn employers that they must resolve questions about their employees’ identities or fire them within 90 days. If they did not, employers could face “stiff penalties,” including fines and even criminal prosecutions for violating a federal law that bars knowingly employing illegal workers, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in announcing the plan Aug. 10.
But the plaintiffs persuaded the judge that the Social Security database was plagued by so many errors that its use in firings would unfairly discriminate against tens of thousands of legal workers and cause sweeping workforce disruptions that would burden companies.
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