States should be cautious to ensure they do not inadvertently inflict damage as they pick up where the federal government has failed by creating a motley assortment of immigration laws across the nation, a Senate Republican leader said.
“We could use a little cooling of the political rhetoric, too,” Senate Majority Whip John Huppenthal also said.
Huppenthal, R-20, says states are likely to continue the trend of aggressively introducing measures, even if the federal authorities step up in enacting and enforcing immigration policies.
“Anything the federal government is going to do is unlikely to make people happy and it is unlikely to quickly solve the problem,” he said.
The senator was responding to a report by the National Conference of State Legislatures saying states have introduced some 1,400 immigration-related bills this year, more than twice the number recorded last year. The group said a total of 171 such bills, spanning a wide range of policy areas including education, employment, and human trafficking, were enacted in 41 states this year.
The view that states are taking the lead in the immigration debate is shared by Sen. Ron Gould, R-3.
More bills likely in 2008
More immigration-related bills are likely to be introduced in the next session, he said.
“We had some hope that they (federal authorities) were actually going to do something, I think, or we would have seen more anti-illegal immigration bills in the Arizona Legislature this year,” said Gould, a conservative member of the state Senate.
“We actually thought the federal government was going to build the fence. Now we don’t think they are going to build the fence so we would probably be back to thinking about border security in the next session,” he said, referring to the 700-mile fence that was supposed to be erected on the U.S.-Mexico border. The measure authorizing the building of the fence was signed into law last year. The project was expected to cost about $2.2 billion.
The view that the federal government has failed to get a handle on the immigration issue was in a way, recently backed by a report detailing its lackluster performance in going after employers who have filed wage reports with Social Security numbers that do not match those in federal databases.
The Providence Journal of Rhode Island ran a story saying the federal government has even identified the most egregious violators, but “few employers are prosecuted for immigration offenses, and even fewer convicted.”
It noted that the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 criminalized “knowingly” hiring illegal immigrants.
“But only 38 employers nationwide were convicted during the most recent fiscal year for any immigration offenses, including the ‘willful’ hiring of illegal immigrants, according to data from the U.S. District Courts,” the newspaper report said.
“The penalty for employers who unknowingly submit wage reports with invalid Social Security numbers is $50 per report, up to a maximum of $250,000 per year. As of last year, not a single penalty had been imposed…,” it said, adding, “Government officials say that even if they can prove a company is hiring illegal immigrants, employers face only misdemeanor charges unless a prosecutor can prove they knew their workers’ documents were phony.”
Huppenthal said that states do not have the enforcement capabilities that the federal government has.
States must also be fastidious as they go ahead and tackle immigration policy, he said.
“We need, as we move forward on this, to carefully assess as we go through each layer what the impact is on everybody because we want to end up with a state that has lower crime rates, more jobs for our citizens, and continued economic growth, and depending on how we execute our plan, we could damage that scenario, inadvertently,” Huppenthal said.
Gov. Janet Napolitano recently signed H2779, a controversial measure that penalizes businesses for knowingly hiring undocumented workers. The law mandates the revocation of a business license on a second offense within three years.
Huppenthal described it as a “transition piece of legislation” and cited the view that it would only apply to new employees.
But people will find a way around this law, and the next step could be “more draconian,” he said.
“We better be carefully tracking what the impact was of the previous piece and understanding what the outcomes are going to be because we are telling people that these legislations are going to create a better Arizona. We ought to know that,” he said.
Referring to H2779, he said: “I feel strongly that this legislation is reasonable, and it is a reasonable response. It is much more modest than the opponents would have people believe, but we are going to see more coming down the road and at each point, we need to very carefully think about this.”