Suman Raghunathan

Evening out the No-Match Mismatch

I’ve been doing a series of posts on the federal government’s myopic efforts to address the nation’s broken immigration system by cracking down on immigrant workers – so here goes another one. At least this time it’s about cautious good newson the SSA No-Match front.

The latest news is that a federal judge just ordered a ten-day extension of a ban on the federal government’s plan to send out roughly 141,000 letters to employers ordering them to crack down on about 8.7 million employees whose legal status may, just may, be in doubt.

Why is this a bad idea, you may ask? Well, allow me to quote Federal Judge Charles Breyer of Federal District Court in San Francisco, who noted, “It is clear to me at this point there would be irreparable harm to the plaintiffs”.

Got that right, Judge Breyer. Let’s talk about the irreparable harm to the plaintiffs: an unlikely alliance of business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, the ACLU, and the National Immigration Law Center, a national immigrant rights group. Those affected by the case include workers (immigrant, native-born, US citizen, green card holder, and undocumented) as well as employers nationwide. This is how little sense this federal policy actually makes – it’s actually served to unite business groups and unions, who are generally sworn enemies. In addition, billions of dollars would NOT make its way into the Social Security program’s coffers (how’s that for a twisted payback?), and exploitative employers would simply have another dirty card to hold above their immigrant workers’ heads and force them to accept unsafe working conditions, unequal pay, and forego the right to unionize. Fair enough. Sounds like irreparable harm to me.

Let me pause here to explain the exact nature of said mismatch. No, I am not referring to a cutesy tween movie on the Disney Channel, nor am I referring to the latest fad in online dating. I’m talking about a landmark federal effort (on hold for now) to ferret out undocumented workers in the name of enforcing federal immigration law. The feds want the Social Security Administration (SSA) to send out letters to employers whenever there appears to be some hanky-panky going on in the worker’s employment history. In SSA parlance, this is a No-Match.

This is where the problems start – according to the SSA Inspector General, 17.8 million of them as of December 2006.

There are many reasons for a No-Match to occur in someone’s employment record – most of which don’t stem from a worker’s immigration status. Errors frequently occur when someone gets married or changes their name and doesn’t inform the Social Security Administration (an agency not exactly famous for its user-friendly qualities). What about when someone moves and may not immediately tell the authorities they’ve done so? And what about when some data entry clerk at SSA simply misspells someone’s name? Same story –a mismatched record. In fact, there are so many mismatches that the current system – called Basic Pilot – literally has a 50% error rate. What’s more, immigrants who’ve become US citizens (meaning they’ve played by all the rules) are 250% more likely than anyone else to have errors in their records.

Apart from being laughably inefficient, the real impact of an effort to enforce No-Match letters would be to hurt all workers and the economy.

Past experience has shown shady employers don’t fire their workers or attempt to straighten things out with SSA immediately after receiving a No-Match letter. Instead, employers wait until their workers begin to demand fair pay, workplace protections, or the right to unionize (rights granted to all workers irrespective of their immigration status) and then fire their employees. One in four employers fired workers who had received No-Match letters only after the worker complained about shoddy safety or working conditions. One in five employers fired so-called No-Match worker after the worker tried to unionize. That doesn’t sound like playing by the rules to me; it sounds like retaliation.

Seems like it’s time to even out the mismatch.

Suman Raghunathan: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 8:02 AM, Oct 03, 2007 in Immigration
Permalink | Email to Friend