Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

3/3/02  News Report -- The Kansas City Star

A plan to keep businesses from hiring undocumented immigrants is being revived by the Kansas City district office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The new strategy represents a major shift for the office.

The office, one of 33 in the nation, has mirrored national INS initiatives in recent years - slackening off workplace enforcement to concentrate more on immigrants who commit other crimes, such as robbery or assault.

Known as Operation Vanguard when it was used briefly in the meat packing industries of Iowa and Nebraska, INS agents subpoena hiring records, then check for discrepancies such as invalid Social Security numbers. Workers with problems in their paperwork are told by the employers when the INS is to return, essentially offering the option to flee. INS returns periodically to recheck records, forcing long-term compliance.

"We want to make sure everyone is lawfully authorized to work," said Michael Smith, assistant district director, investigations, in Kansas City. "The bottom line is, the employee is a factor. But the employer's violation of the law is the more heinous issue in my eyes."

Any business in the Kansas City office's jurisdiction - all of Missouri and Kansas - could be faced with such an audit.

The corporate-owned stores of McDonald's in Johnson County were the first scrutinized in an ongoing investigation that began in November.

So far, 17 McDonald's workers have been arrested by the INS. One worker is still in custody. The rest have left the country under a process called voluntary deportation or have been deported, a more lengthy legal process. No action has been taken against McDonald's.

"We value all of our employees," said David Kallas, director of marketing for McDonald's heartland region. "We need them to run our restaurants. At the same time, we have to comply with the law."

Operation Vanguard was stopped in 1999 because of political pressures. Some of the same concerns are being raised in Kansas City.

The deportations concern local Hispanic leadership. They were a topic at Friday's Coalition of Hispanic Organizations monthly meeting. The coalition became involved when some Hispanic workers of McDonald's protested and were later arrested by the INS. The workers alleged that a McDonald's manager had said she wanted to get rid of Hispanic employees. 'Sacrificial lambs'

Operation Vanguard was shut down before its first birthday. Smith worked in the INS Omaha, Neb., office during the Vanguard program, and was instrumental in bringing it to the Kansas City area.

Pressure quickly mounted against the Omaha program. Hispanic advocates said it was a simplistic answer to complex issues and unfairly made targets of Latinos. Meat industry lobbyists balked at the effect on their work forces. And the Social Security Administration raised issues about the privacy of its records.

But the program had supporters. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, said Operation Vanguard "had real prospects of real success rather than the scattershot work site raids that might yield arrest statistics for officers but little else."

INS officials agreed that such practices did little long term to deter the hiring of undocumented immigrants.

"The point of it was to do it every couple, three months to wean the employers off of their dependence of illegal labor," Krikorian said.

But other advocates fear immigrants will be the "sacrificial lambs," with lots of deportations and little ever done to employers.

"Their crime is existing here without a piece of paper," said Max Cerda, who is active in Hispanic issues in Kansas.

Local social service workers and some former McDonald's workers said a few local Latino families with members who worked for the fast-food chain are in hiding, fearful of being found by the INS. Some families have even pulled their American-born children from schools, said Jeanine Noguera, a member of the Task Force on Hispanic Affairs in Johnson County.

Others said the plan will spark discrimination against legal and native-born Hispanics. A 1990 government report substantiates that fear. It studied the INS' first efforts to fine employers and found "widespread" discrimination by employers who feared the INS sanctions. Instead, employers began to "play it safe" by not hiring anyone who looked or sounded "foreign."

The INS plan will cause a "climate of fear" for immigrants and employers, said Melinda Lewis, special projects coordinator of El Centro, a social service agency that recently expanded its Kansas City, Kan., offices to begin serving new immigrants in Johnson County.

"Well-meaning employers jump off the deep end and begin pre-emptively punishing a lot of perfectly documented Hispanic workers by not hiring them," she said.

Smith stressed that the program is designed to have employees know when the INS will visit to discuss record discrepancies. The practice essentially offers the undocumented the option of not showing up for work that day.

It was not until the passage of legislation in 1986 that the INS got the ability to fine employers for hiring undocumented people. Prior to that, efforts focused on finding undocumented people.

But the fines are only for employers who "knowingly" hire undocumented immigrants. The standard has proved to be hard for the INS to reach. A major hurdle is the lack of a national database for employers to check records, officials and experts said. And the INS found it easier to continue chasing individual immigrants rather than build cases against employers through administrative channels.

The INS in Kansas City hopes the sustained approach to tracking hiring patterns will help reach an even higher burden of proof in some cases - building criminal convictions of employers.

"We can't arrest everybody because we don't have the bodies to do that and also we have to think about available detention space," Smith said. "We're not really after the employees, but we do want to know if they are being exploited."

Johnson County was chosen to begin the program because its higher income bracket and its need for low-skilled workers makes it a prime spot for immigrant labor, Smith said.

Also, the INS already has established a strong tie to law enforcement there, something it began doing in recent years in many areas nationwide. The Johnson County Sheriff's Department regularly uses a national database that checks a person's identification against national criminal and INS records, and alerts the INS when undocumented people are apprehended.

In November, the INS subpoenaed records for 15 corporate-owned McDonald's stores in the Kansas City area, said Kallas of McDonald's. The records involved about 500 employees.

The planned next step in the program was for the INS to return to McDonald's on an agreed-upon date. McDonald's would have been asked to tell the employees of the meeting.

But the protest at an Overland Park McDonald's helped thwart the plan.

The INS is sensitive to appearing at a work site with ongoing labor disputes because of past incidents nationally in which the agency has been accused of unwittingly participating in union busting.

So INS agents used the records it had already checked to arrest people at their homes, Smith said.

Word spread quickly among immigrant workers, said one former McDonald's employee.

"I was working double shifts because no one was showing up for work," she said. "I was calling people, actually begging them to come to work."

The employee declined to be named because her fiancé, also a former McDonald's worker, was still being held by the INS on charges that he overstayed a tourist visa and was working without the proper paperwork.

McDonald's officials declined to comment further about their dealings with the INS. Climate change?

The nation's climate following the Sept. 11 attacks may make the latest effort more successful than Operation Vanguard, INS officials and others say.

"September 11 has taught some people in the administration that immigration enforcement needs to take place across the board for homeland security," Krikorian said. "You can't have a border where the good illegal aliens are let in and the bad illegal aliens are kept out. Any terrorist can sneak through the same way workers can."

But that political shift had not occurred when Operation Vanguard was first tried by the INS Omaha district office. At the time, the INS estimated that 25 percent of the industry's work force was undocumented.

After examining more than 24,000 hiring forms, 4,762 people with record discrepancies were identified at 40 meat packing and processing plants.

Only 34 arrests of undocumented immigrants were made.

"That was OK for us," said Jerry Heinauer, district director of the INS Omaha office. The real focus, he said, was to create legal work forces.

The program ended before a second check of the company's hiring records could be made.

"We were working through our channels with the region and headquarters in getting the Social Security Administration on board and having the service from a national perspective endorse the program," Heinauer said. "We never really got the support."

"What Operation Vanguard did accomplish is it got a public dialogue going, and I think that it encouraged a more educated citizenry with respect to illegal aliens in the workplace," Heinauer said.