Line in the Sand

Builders could be on the hook to verify employees' legal status.

The May 9 raid on three of Fischer Homes' jobsites in Kentucky, where federal agents arrested 76 undocumented workers and four of Fischer's own supervisors, was a loud and unsubtle warning shot fired by the government across the bow of the housing industry, that builders are going to be held directly accountable for the legal status of the people they hire to build their homes.

The government's complaint against Fischer's superintendents stated unambiguously that builders are responsible for ensuring that their contractors employ documented labor. What's less clear, though, is how builders are supposed to do this, especially when what subs present as “papers” are often fake but hard to detect. In March, 11 defendants were charged in Los Angeles with running a counterfeit mill that supplies fraudulent documents to immigrant workers. Those arrests were the result of a four-month investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and showed that the government is finally getting serious about tracking down phony identity paperwork.

The public is demanding that legitimacy be restored to the documentation process. The Pew Hispanic Center polled 2,000 adults in March, and more than three-quarters favor some form of national identification card. Two-thirds also favor the creation of a worker database. Future federal budgets include more money for workplace investigations and enforcement. All of this seems to be leading toward holding employers more accountable for validating the legality of their workers.

Given the current mood of the country, more builders might find themselves registering with the federal “Basic Pilot” program, which has been around since 1996 and is run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. Within three days of hiring someone, employers enter the worker's information—social security number, address, driver's license, etc.—into Basic Pilot's database, which flags discrepancies with existing records. Employers in the program agree to fire anyone whom this system doesn't confirm.

Congress wants all employers in Basic Pilot within five years. But critics say that the program still has computer and data problems. “We're not talking about American Express here,” quips James Carafano, senior fellow with The Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank, comparing AMEX's seamless capability to verify cardholder information for such things as bill payment or Internet purchases with the government's still-archaic computer systems that don't permit critical interagency communication. Carafano also poses a question that most builders don't want to hear, but which might resonate with the larger public: Shouldn't housing and other industries where the vast majority of undocumented workers gravitate bear the cost of any national verification system?

BUILDER's “Immigrant Worker Impact Survey” is based on 795 responses to an electronic survey that was sent out to 42,902 of the magazine's readers in February 2006.The response rate was just under 2 percent.Specpan,a market research firm, disseminated the survey by e-mail, collected the results, and developed the report.Responses from participants are held in strictest confidence, but some respondents chose to speak on the record for this special report.Accuracy of the data is +/- 5 percent.

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