Tag Archives: Immigration

Employers Targeted in ICE Raids and Audits

If you think that only illegal aliens need to be concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), then as an employer, you have not been paying attention in 2018, when ICE has clearly put businesses in the crosshairs with compliance audits and enforcement raids.

Take, for example, a raid conducted by ICE in small town Tennessee in April 2018. The Southeastern Provision meatpacking plant reportedly employed at least 104 undocumented immigrants at the time of the surprise raid. The company hired most of these without requiring the employees to complete the required I-9 forms and without making them provide documents showing their identities and authorization to work legally in the United States. To make matters more felonious, these workers were paid in cash each week and not reported on the company’s payroll tax reports.

Last month, the owner of that Southeastern Provision meatpacking plant agreed to a plea bargain in federal court on charges of tax evasion, wire fraud and employing undocumented immigrants. The owner has not been sentenced to prison yet, but he has already agreed to pay at least $1,296,183 to the IRS in restitution.

Similar worksite raids have escalated dramatically under the Trump administration and are happening all over the country. On August 28, a trailer manufacturer located near Paris, Texas, faced one of the largest immigration raids in recent history, when 159 of its approximately 500 employees were arrested by ICE. Because that Texas company, Load Trail, was fined $445,000 four years ago for hiring dozens of undocumented workers, one could reasonably expect the employer to also face jail time and restitution requirements for a pattern and practice of breaking the immigration laws.

How do companies get selected for raids? Continue reading Employers Targeted in ICE Raids and Audits

“Hire American” Doesn’t Justify Employing Only Citizens

As an employer, you have to verify the work eligibility of every employee, and that frustrating process might make you consider hiring only U.S. citizens. Please reconsider.

The form for verification, the I-9 form, is confusing and some of the documents you are presented may not look familiar to you—permanent residence cards, foreign passports, employment authorization documents, tribal documents. So, you may find completion of the required I-9 form stressful, especially since you have to swear under oath on the I-9 itself that the documents the employee presented and you examined appear to be genuine and the person is authorized to work in the U.S. to the best of your knowledge.

It is tempting to consider just making a blanket rule that you will only hire U.S. citizens. Then, you would only need to look at a driver’s license and social security card. Additionally, President Trump signed an executive order last year requiring “Buy American, Hire American” (notwithstanding the fact that he uses foreign guest workers as servers, housekeepers and cooks at his properties like Mar-A-Lago). So, wouldn’t you just be doing your patriotic duty by hiring only American-born workers at your company?

No.

There are both longstanding legal and historical reasons that “Hire American” should only be treated as a slogan and not an employment policy.

The same Immigration Reform and Control Act (“IRCA”) that introduced the I-9 form to American employers in 1986 also codified that employers with four or more employees are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of citizenship status, which occurs when adverse employment decisions are made based upon an individual’s real or perceived citizenship in the U.S. (or lack of citizenship) or an applicant’s legal immigration status.

The IRCA antidiscrimination provisions also prohibit small employers (e.g., those with four to fourteen employees) from committing national origin discrimination against any U.S. citizen or individual with employment authorization. Employers with 15 or more workers were already prohibited from considering national origin in employment decisions by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Any employer who only hires applicants born in the United States discriminates against all other national origins.

Therefore, any employer who takes into account an applicant’s country of birth or citizenship status when making hiring decisions violates federal law. Your only interest in someone’s citizenship or immigration status should be finding out within the first three days of work whether your new employee is eligible to work in the United States, no matter where that employee is from or whether he or she is a visa-holder, born elsewhere but now a green-card holder, or a citizen, naturalized or native-born.

But it isn’t only for legal reasons that you should never discriminate against legal immigrants in your workplace. Hiring legal immigrants also strengthens our democracy.

It is  important to understand the historical context of denying a legal immigrant the chance to work in America, which is supposed to be the Land of Opportunity. Our history is full of times when we excluded groups of immigrants in ways that now seems nonsensical.

For example, in the 1840’s and 1850’s, Irish immigrants fleeing a deathly famine and British oppression arrived on the East Coast in “coffin ships” (so called because almost 25% of the passengers who started the journey died during the passage). All of the lucky ones who survived to reach the United States were hungry, many were unskilled (often farmers who were initially unsuited to work in urban areas), and almost every one of them was Catholic. This was at a time when some Protestant conspiracy theorists fanned the flames of fear that the pope and his army would land in the United States, overthrow the government, establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati (of all places), and impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land.

(Forgive me if you already know all of this, but it appears to me that, 170 years later, the mistakes of our history are being forgotten and, therefore, will be inevitably repeated).

In cities like Boston, it was hard to assimilate such large numbers of immigrants and some employers decided it was easier just to exclude Irish workers from employment completely. “No Irish Need Apply” was a sign common in Boston storefronts at that time.

National origin and religious prejudice ran high across the country, and bigoted groups formed, such as the Know-Nothing party who believed that Protestantism defined American values and Irish Catholics had no place in America (regardless of the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of religion).

Fortunately, America also had its better angels. Abraham Lincoln was among the many Americans disturbed at the rise of this bigotry, as he explained in an 1855 letter to a friend: Continue reading “Hire American” Doesn’t Justify Employing Only Citizens

Employers Must Use Revised I-9 Form Beginning September 18

The very important I-9 form, which verifies a new employee’s identity and eligibility to work in the United States, has been revised again. Employers must start using the revised form on September 18, 2017.

The revision, marked “07/17/17 N” and carrying an expiration date of 08/31/19, has to be completed only by new hires. You do not have to go back and get all of your current employees to recomplete an I-9 just because the form changed after their hire date.

Employers must complete an I-9 form on each new employee within 3 days of hiring. This process started in 1986 as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which prohibits employers from taking on a new employee without verifying the employee’s identification and eligibility to work legally in the United States.

The verification is done by reviewing the employee’s identification and employment eligibility documents, such as a passport, a permanent resident card, or a driver’s license and social security card, and completing the I-9 form. There is a very helpful employer’s guide available online that shows you what a valid document is supposed to look like. Doing your due diligence requires that you consult that guide each time you look at a new employee’s documents.

Because of the views of the current administration, employers can expect an increase in enforcement of immigration laws, including more frequent ICE audits of your I-9 compliance. There are expensive penalties if you as an employer cannot produce accurately completed I-9 forms for each of your current and former employees.

The minimum fine is $216 per error on an I-9 and the maximum is $2,156 per error (including current employees and former employees) for each paperwork violation. That means that a single I-9 form which has multiple errors could cause the employer to be responsible for multiple penalties per form. If ICE determines that the employer has failed to accurately complete I-9s on at least 50% of its employees, the maximum fine of $2,156 will be levied on the employer for each form.

You must keep an I-9 form on every active employee as long as the employee works for you. For a terminated employee, you must be able to produce an I-9 for three years after the hire date or one year after termination, whichever is later. To make it easier to remember, most employers wait to purge I-9 forms until three years after an employee’s termination.

Typically, when ICE appears for an I-9 audit, they will require that you produce I-9 forms for each current employee and any employee terminated in the last three years. You are given 72-hours’ notice to pull all of these forms together, which is why many employers store the I-9 forms together rather than in each employee’s individual file.

2017 New Year’s Resolutions for Employers

At the beginning of each year, I encourage my business clients to make some New Year’s resolutions to achieve better compliance with the myriad employment laws. Based on what many of my clients are telling me and what the courts and enforcement agencies have on their agendas, here are the employment matters that you could improve in 2017:

  • Immigration compliance: President-Elect Trump has promised strong enforcement of the immigration laws. Many of those enforcement efforts will affect employers, such as mandatory use of the E-Verify system to double-check the legal status of every new hire. Even before that requirement is put in to place, resolve to correctly complete the mandatory new I-9 form for every new hire. The best way to make sure the I-9 is correctly completed: consult the government-published Employer’s Guide to the I-9, particularly the color pictures that show you exactly what a valid permanent resident card, for example, looks like. Also, be prepared that some of your employees may lose their work eligibility under the new administration, including young people (known as the Dreamers) who became eligible under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012.
  • Market rate on salaries: Texas’ unemployment rate was sitting at 4.6% at the end of November 2016. Amarillo’s rate was 3.0%. Economists consider 3% to be full employment, meaning you as an employer maybe finding it difficult to attract and keep the talent that you need. I am always surprised therefore when my clients don’t keep up with the market data on salaries. Resolve in 2016 to tap into the data available on the Bureau of Labor Statistics for your industry and your location to really analyze whether your salaries are sufficient. Employees will also be looking at Salary.com and Payscale.com, so you need to do the same.
  • Improve your PTO offering: I am amazed when I am drafting or revising my client’s employment handbooks how little paid time off many local employers offer. Many don’t give an employee any vacation, sick leave, personal days or other paid time off during the first year and then rarely allow more than five days per year after that. This will not attract top talent or create long-term loyal employees, I promise you. Particularly if you are hiring millennials or need an educated workforce, you need to up your game on PTO. My 22-year-old son was hired in 2015 by a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., right out of college (with a degree in economics and a master’s degree in business analytics) and offered three weeks of PTO that started accruing immediately. After one promotion, employees at his company get four weeks of PTO. I’m not arguing that every job merits that much PTO, but resolve in 2017 to at least consider that two weeks per year should be the minimum to improve your hiring, increase your retention, rejuvenate your employees every year and allow your employees to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life. As an employment lawyer, I know that most employee lawsuits arise after the worker leaves your employ. Keeping your staff reasonably happy and loyal by providing better PTO will provide you with other benefits too, but I like it because you will spend less time with me in court and instead we can just have lunch and talk about more pleasant topics.
  • Health Reimbursement Accounts: None of us know what the new administration will create to replace the Affordable Care Act, so I can’t give you much advice yet about your group health insurance offerings. However, employers with less than 50 employees who don’t offer group health insurance should resolve to consider using Health Reimbursement Accounts in 2017 because of the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act that sailed through Congress and the President’s signature in December. That act included permission for small employers to now use HRA’s to pay for qualified out-of-pocket medical expenses for their employees and to fund individual health insurance premiums. In other words, employers can use pretax dollars to help employees to purchase their own insurance on the open market while capping the employer’s contribution at a reasonable amount. There are, of course, many restrictions associated with this opportunity, but it is worth consideration by smaller employers in 2017.
  • Good Documentation: Every employment lawyer would like for you to add this to your resolution list each year. Memories fail and managers move on, so written documents are often an employer’s only evidence of the nondiscriminatory reasons that certain employment actions were taken. Understand and resolve that performance reviews, reasons for bonuses and merit increases, violations of policy, attendance problems, changes in job duties and disciplinary actions will be well-documented in 2017. I’ll help with any of kind of documentation, but I highly recommend that you get me involved whenever the documentation is of disability or religious accommodations, FMLA, harassment claims, overtime or other compensation problems, egregious policy violations, demotions, final warnings, layoffs and terminations.
  • Gratitude: Resolve that you will say “thank you” more often to your employees in 2017. Studies have repeatedly shown that this one action can enhance employee engagement and loyalty even more than raises and promotions. Gratitude can also make your workplace so much more enjoyable for all of your employees.

 

New Employees Should Complete New I-9 Form

If you are hiring any employees, this is just a quick reminder that you need to start using the new I-9 form to confirm your new worker’s eligibility to be employed in the United States.

The new I-9 form was released on November 14, 2016 (look for that date on the form to verify that you are using the most recent one). You already can be using the new form, but it is mandatory that you are using that new form by January 22, 2017. My suggestion for making it easy on yourself is to begin using the new form today, or at least no later than January 1, 2017, so that you start the new year off right.

You do not have to update any of your completed I-9s on current employees with the new form. It is only mandatory that you start using the new I-9 with employees who are hired beginning in January 2017.

As you know, employers must assure an I-9 is completed on each new employee hired (citizen or otherwise) to document identity and authorization to legally work in the United States. The new employee must bring the proper forms of identification and work authorization so that you can complete the I-9 by the third business day of employment, or you can no longer employ that worker.

Mistakes happen on an incredibly frequent basis while filling out I-9 forms and employers get penalized substantially if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) audits an employer’s forms. Here is a guide to the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Another way to avoid mistakes on the I-9 form is Continue reading New Employees Should Complete New I-9 Form

Employers Responsible for Preventing Illegal Immigration

In all of the talk about immigration in this election year, it is important for businesses to understand that the responsibility for preventing illegal immigration generally rests on employers, who must verify that all new hires are eligible to work in this country.

Under the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), employers are mandated to verify an employee’s identity and eligibility to work in the United States by completing an Employment Eligibility Verification, more commonly known as a Form I-9.

The current version of the I-9 (available here) says on the form that it expired on March 31, 2016, but it is still in effect three months later because a newer version has not been released.

Every employer, regardless of the size of the business, must present the latest version of the Form I-9 to each prospective employee and confirm that employee completes and signs the employee section of the form.  The employer is required to inspect the employee’s supporting documents and have an authorized individual from the Company sign the employer section of the I-9.  All of these items must be completed within three (3) business days of the employee’s hire date.

An employer’s failure to properly complete the Form I-9 can bring about costly fines by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  As recently as April 2016, a judge ruled that Golden Employment Company in Minnesota was liable for failure to timely present I-9 forms for at least 125 employees as well as not preparing forms in any capacity for almost 236 workers.  The employer also inaccurately completed some of the I-9s.  The civil penalties totaled $209,600.

Most ICE inspections result from complaints from current employees, former employees, labor unions and even competitors. However, random inspections are also undertaken by ICE.  It’s important to make sure all of your work eligibility records are up-to-date and properly completed.

What can you do to avoid penalties and ensure I-9 compliance? Continue reading Employers Responsible for Preventing Illegal Immigration