The Department of Justice is cracking down on the prevention of illegal alien fraud. And no, that wasn't a mistype.
The DOJ issued a press statement Monday announcing it had reached a settlement with a TEG Staffing Inc., also known as Eastridge Workforce Solutions, a temp agency in San Diego, because the company had actually been trying to verify whether non-citizen applicants had a legal right to work in the United States by requiring them to provide certain identifying documents.
According to the Justice Department:
The department’s investigation found that from at least March 2014 until at least September 2015, Eastridge had a pattern or practice of requesting specific immigration documents from non-U.S. citizens for the Form I-9 and E-Verify processes. In contrast, Eastridge allowed U.S. citizens to present whichever valid documents they wanted to present to prove their work authorization.
Under the INA, all workers, including non-U.S. citizens, must be allowed to choose whichever valid documentation they would like to present from the Lists of Acceptable Documents to prove their work authorization, such as a driver’s license and unrestricted Social Security card. It is unlawful for an employer to limit employees’ choice of documentation because of their citizenship or immigration status.
So for the terrible crime of requesting a foreign worker provide certain immigration documents to verify their identity and work authorization, TEG Staffing Inc. now gets to pay $175,000 in civil penalties and “will undergo department monitoring and review of its processes for verifying the work authorization of newly hired employees.”
In doing so, the DOJ claims it's protecting "lawful, authorized U.S. workers" from discrimination by hindering the company's efforts to weed out potential illegal alien workers.
But the Justice Department doesn’t seem nearly as interested in going after companies who do employ illegal alien workers in violation of federal law. According to Pew Research, there were more than 8 million illegal aliens in the U.S. workforce in 2012, comprising a little more than 5 percent of the nation’s workforce. And the companies that illegally employ them face little to no chance of being audited for violating federal immigration law.
In fact, instead of cracking down on companies who do employ these unauthorized workers, President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is actually paying companies to hire some illegal alien college graduates over U.S.-born citizens as part of the president’s executive actions on immigration.
But behind the not-so-inconspicuous agenda of protecting “undocumented workers,” the DOJ’s stated beef with TEG Staffing Inc. is that the company required alien workers to present certain immigration documents, rather than letting them choose from a long list of acceptable forms of I.D. Which might have a prayer of making sense if that same federal government didn’t have such a rich history of encouraging document fraud.
In fact, a recent Senate hearing revealed the IRS doesn’t typically take action against an employer or their illegal alien employee when the agency receives a W-2 tax refund form with a false Social Security number, nor does the agency inform the U.S. citizen that his or her SSN has been stole and is being used by an illegal alien.