Suman Raghunathan

Update on the No-Match Mismatch

This may be a record: good news for two consecutive posts. Is the sky falling?

This week the good news is a California federal judge’s ruling last Friday (aptly timed to coincide with Labor Day weekend in a ruling that actually jives with the holiday’s principles of honoring the contributions of workers, both immigrant and native-born) temporarily barring the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from sending out No-Match letters that would adversely affect millions of workers nationwide.

For now, SSA and DHS must await the result of an October 1st hearing to determine whether their proposed policy to send out letters (to employers requiring them to fix alleged discrepancies between an employee’s records and the Social Security database within 90 days, fire the worker, or risk up to $10,000 in fines or federal prosecution) should be permanently struck down.

Finally, some sanity (even if it’s only from the judicial branch and not the executive or legislative ones) on immigration policy.

Originally, SSA No-Match letters were scheduled to go out yesterday (September 4th) to over 140,000 employers regarding the records of more than 8 million workers with a broad spectrum of immigration statuses: US citizens, legal permanent residents, temporary workers, students, and undocumented immigrants.

Reflecting the real stakeholders affected by the feds’ misguided enforcement-only immigration policies, the ruling responded to a lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO, the National Immigration Law Center, the ACLU, and local labor groups like the Central Labor Council of Northern California. The lawsuit charged that the DHS rule would threaten jobs of U.S. citizens and other legally authorized workers simply because of errors in the government's inaccurate social security earnings databases. For more on the lawsuit and background on the issue, click here.

I’ve written recently about why these so-called No-Match letters are a no-go. So let me just do a refresh on my points, seeing as how a federal judge appears to at least give some weight to them (enough to want to explore them in a hearing, at least):

1. Penalizing immigrant workers and their employers for working in the US will neither address nor fix our nation’s currently flawed immigration policy. What we need first is a broad and fair legalization program to level the playing field with respect to immigration status, and then we need to enforce good worker protections and minimum wage laws already on the books. This one-two combination is what will make the biggest and most fundamental difference to workers and their quality of life– and it will target shady employers (the supposed targets of the No-Match policy in the first place) who seek to cheat immigrant (and often undocumented) workers out of a fair wage by holding their immigration status as a bargaining chip above their heads. For more information on how to honor the economic contributions of immigrant workers while meeting the needs of the American middle class, click here for DMI’s report.

2. Though No-Match letters themselves state they do not “make any statement about an employee’s immigration status”, experienced immigrant workers’ advocates know that in the past employers have used No-Match letters (which ironically refer to the ‘safe harbor code’ in federal immigration law) to fire immigrant workers who demand fair wages, back pay, the right to unionize, or other basic worker protections. Sending out millions of No-Match letters will simply give unscrupulous employers the green light to harass or fire workers (whether they are undocumented or not) who they feel are expendable, and then allow them to perpetuate a cycle of exploiting a whole new set of workers based on their immigration status.

3. Depending on the legendarily flawed SSA database to enforce an inherently flawed enforcement-only immigration policy is at best risky and at worst fundamentally unfair to all workers, immigrant and native-born alike. SSA and reports have acknowledged a sizeable percentage of records in the database are incorrect due to name misspellings, incorrect data entry, address changes, and all manner of incorrect information (hello, hanging chads and errors in voter databases!). You do the math: SSA says there are roughly 250 million records with discrepancies in its database. There are roughly 12 million undocumented people in the US. Clearly, we have some mathematical problems here with using the SSA database as a proxy for enforcing misguided national immigration laws.
In fact, here’s the word straight from SSA itself on the inaccuracy of its database and on the folly of depending upon flawed SSA records, as cited by the National Immigration Law Center, one of the plaintiffs in the case:
“SSA has recognized in the past that the issuance of a “no-match” letter does not indicate that an employee is not authorized to work; [and] when SSA has been able to resolve mismatches, most turned out to involve U.S. citizens.”

‘Nuff said on just how it doesn’t make sense to depend on the SSA database to enforce misguided national immigration policy.

In the meantime, advocates for immigrants and workers await the October 1st ruling. For more information on their advocacy efforts with DHS and SSA, as well as their community organizing campaigns in the interim, click here.

Hopefully we’ll soon see the end of the No-Match mismatch.

Suman Raghunathan: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 8:07 AM, Sep 05, 2007 in Immigration
Permalink | Email to Friend