Employers may pay price for not embracing changes

The Department of Homeland Security significantly stepped up immigration enforcement efforts in 2007.

But illegal immigration opponents say it must do a better job of targeting the lure of illegal immigration: The availability of work.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement made nearly four times as many workplace arrests as it did in 2006. Of those 4,900 arrests, 864 people were charged with a crime, more than 500 of which involved document fraud and identity theft in an attempt to appear to be legal residents.

The number of employers or managers arrested for hiring illegal immigrants was fewer than 100, however.

"When you have more than 500,000 illegals entering this country every year, you are not going to cut off the incentive until you start drying up employment. Employment is the No. 1 reason illegal immigrants come here,” said Bryan Griffith, spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies, which is opposed to illegal immigration. "You can have as much border enforcement or random arresting of illegal immigrants as you want. But if you are able to cut off that incentive, they will most likely self-deport or not enter at all.”

Worksite enforcement

The federal immigration agency also ramped up other enforcement teams. For instance, Fugitive Operations Teams — which focus on finding illegal immigrants who already have been asked to leave the country, have criminal convictions in other countries or are fugitives — arrested more than 30,000 illegal immigrants nationally, doubling its 2006 numbers.

In north Texas and Oklahoma, those teams arrested 1,600, which also doubled 2006 numbers. Of those arrested, 699 were fugitives and 168 were illegal immigrants with criminal convictions. Nearly 1,100 of those arrested in Oklahoma and north Texas have been deported to their countries of origin.

A raid in Oklahoma City in early September, involving the federal program Operation Community Shield with cooperation of state and local officials, netted 65 alleged immigrant gang members.

However, workplace raids targeting employers present an additional burden on the immigration agency. Experts say it is easier to round up illegal immigrants in the workplace than it is to prove that employers knowingly hired illegal immigrants. Workplace arrests are made at a ratio of about 50 employees to one employer.

Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration research group, says arresting employers is more difficult and time consuming, but the government must improve this ratio to change behavior.

"They want to change the calculations that employers make. If the risk is too small, they will behave exactly the way they've been behaving,” Papademetriou said.

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