Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration
By JULIA PRESTON
NY Times

Under pressure from the toughest crackdown on illegal immigration in two
decades, employers across the country are fighting back in state
legislatures, the federal courts and city halls.

Business groups have resisted measures that would revoke the licenses of
employers of illegal immigrants. They are proposing alternatives that
would revise federal rules for verifying the identity documents of new
hires and would expand programs to bring legal immigrant laborers.

Though the pushback is coming from both Democrats and Republicans, in
many places it is reopening the rift over immigration that troubled the
Republican Party last year. Businesses, generally Republican stalwarts,
are standing up to others within the party who accuse them of
undercutting border enforcement and jeopardizing American jobs by hiring
illegal immigrants as cheap labor.

Employers in Arizona were stung by a law passed last year by the
Republican-controlled Legislature that revokes the licenses of
businesses caught twice with illegal immigrants. They won approval in
this year’s session of a narrowing of that law making clear that it did
not apply to workers hired before this year.

Last week, an Arizona employers’ group submitted more than 284,000
signatures — far more than needed — for a November ballot initiative
that would make the 2007 law even friendlier to employers.

Also in recent months, immigration bills were defeated in Indiana and
Kentucky — states where control of the legislatures is split between
Democrats and Republicans — due in part to warnings from business groups
that the measures could hurt the economy.

In Oklahoma, chambers of commerce went to federal court and last month
won an order suspending sections of a 2007 state law that would require
employers to use a federal database to check the immigration status of
new hires. In California, businesses have turned to elected officials,
including the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, to lobby federal
immigration authorities against raiding long-established companies.

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Dirty corporations and dirty Republicans...a match made in purgatory.