The law says that you can’t use e-verify except as required by federal law. Private employers who do not receive federal contracts are not required by federal law to use e-verify. And so are prohibited from using e-verify in California.
Based on what you quoted, though, is the right to privacy the employee’s right to privacy or the employer’s right to privacy? In other words, does the employee’s file belong to the employee or the employer? What you shared says:
" In sum, employers do not have to allow ICE agents into a workplace, or allow them access to employee records or databases unless they have a valid warrant signed by a judge."
That makes it seem, this new California law aside, that if ICE looks at an employee’s file without a warrant, it’s the employer’s right that is being violated. This is an important distinction, because you can always waive your own right to privacy. In other words, except for this specific law, it seems like an employer can turn his personnel files over to ICE if he wants.
Giving information to ICE is not a crime in CA (pre AB450). I don’t think it’s a violation in any other state, but could be wrong on that. It’s not a requirement, but before AB450 it was voluntary.
Think about it like inviting police into your house that you share with 4 other housemates. That’s allowed, and the police can observe the shared space. For businesses, AB450 says you can’t invite ICE inside.
This is where I am confused as well. I can consent to my stuff being searched, but what constitutes “my stuff” and “my consent” and where does “my stuff and my consent” end and my employee’s stuff and non-consent start?
I was assuming I-9 inspection, not other stuff, like looking for specific illegal immigrants. Really, if ICE suspects you have illegal immigrants on premise, they can wait outside(and do, as has been highly publicized). But sure, ICE does not have the right to see anything without a warrant other than the I-9 form and supporting documentation. Which is more than enough for them to get what they need. But yeah, if they wanted to come in and harass my employees, they’d get the same reaction from me as if the IRS tried that. When I managed a pizza place, I had law enforcement call me, from local police to the FBI to the IRS. Unless I judged the request to be a public safety issue, I told them to get bent. The IRS wanted me to tell them how much tips someone made compared to what they were reporting. While I didn’t like the fact that tipped employees underreport their tips, I wasn’t about to give those IRS bastards any help. But I wouldn’t argue that it was unlawful for another manager to choose differently.
Did you read the law? Not just the summary of the law on the top? Because that’s not what the law actually says.
Let me quote the part of the law for you, even though Evil Economist already has…bolding mine.
Can you please explain what the parts i’ve bolded mean if you don’t agree that they let an employer using E-verify to check the employment authorization status of a person who’s been offered employment.
I linked to the actual bill. Did it change before passage?
I seem to be right on the same page with you, then Adaher
I don’t know. I copied the text from the link you gave. You might want to look again at the bill you linked to?
Utterly wrong. Is our children learning?
It is for the govt’s use under due process of law. It is not for the govts use to go on a fishing expedition.
Guns are weird, and I don’t really know all the laws around them, but in this hypothetical, are you saying that they have a warrant or not?
Is there a law that says that FFL’s have to give their information to LEO that requests it?
If neither, I would be a bit upset to know that the FFL that I bought my gun through volunteered my info to a cop who had nothing but a serial number to offer in exchange, but if either of those conditions are true (warrant or law), then that’s fine.
I doubt that they will prosecute for the mere act of complying with ICE’s requests, but they probably will if that compliance ends up causing harm, or at the very least, open the employer up for liability. If you are following the law, it is hard to sue you for harm that causes. If you are breaking the law, it is much easier to get the one who caused the damage to make you whole.
That they have access to one form does not mean that they should have access to all.
Provide a tip, even testify to what he has witnessed, sure. Divulge personal information of employees to outside people, not so much.
Well, here we come back to the “orwellian notions”, where having your options limited is freedom.
I call it “being free to be coerced.” I might not want to grant ICE agents this stuff, but they are pressuring me, showing up several times a week, asking me “If you don’t have anything to hide, why don’t you just let us look?”, “Hey, if you don’t show us your staff areas, then we are going to get a warrant to do so, and you don’t want that”… and so on. If you don’t think that LEO uses every tool they can in order to coerce people into giving up their rights, then you are blissfully naive.
Not to hijack, but it is similar to the anti-discrimination laws. You are optimistic in that you don’t think that if we got rid of them, that discrimination would not become rampant, I am not so much. And I don’t think it will be because shop and restaurant owners will declare themselves bigots and shut out minorities, I think it will happen due to pressure of other customers.
As is, if a customer comes into my restaurant, and asks, “Why do you let those [insert slur for a minority] eat here?!” I can reply, “The law says I have to serve all customers.” If there is no anti-discrimination law, then I instead have to take a stand there, and say “I don’t discriminate, and I serve all customers.” then the bigots complain about that policy. I can see business owners conforming to their customer’s desires. “I am not a racist, it just makes some of my other customers uncomfortable to have people of [minority] eating in the same dining room.”
The philosophy here is that the govt should have a monopoly on coercion, and that only under proper due process of law. If you are free from govt coercion, but that just leave you vulnerable to coercion of kinds that are not under the due process of law, I feel that that limits your freedoms, not expands them.
Does that make any sense?
And just like how the health inspector can check out your coolers and temperatures and food handling processes, they can’t audit your book, the ICE agent who has access to a single document from an employee does not have access to all your other employment records and staff spaces.
What I take away from that is that the law should really be extended to all LEO, not just ICE.
Yes, similar to ICE’s rights to inspect I-9 forms. The ATF has power to conduct regular inspections of FFLs records, looking for violations. Aside from those regularly-scheduled inspections, I’m certain that, at least at some FFLs, there’s a fair bit of voluntary cooperation with the ATF (for an example gone horribly wrong, you could see the infamous Operation Fast and Furious).
You (and I) might be upset, but there’s nothing that prevents this. All across the country, in all aspects of law enforcement, citizens voluntarily cooperate every day. Everything from reporting crimes to consenting to searches to testifying to sharing information with the police. It happens all the time. It’s utterly mundane.
Look at this from the FFL’s perspective for a moment. They’re trying to run a business. There’s a federal agency that will come in periodically and pour over every bit of paperwork they do, looking for mistakes and errors. When they inevitably find some, it’s up to that federal agency to determine the punishment. Do they really want to take an adversarial “come back with a warrant” attitude with those people?
There are other cases where the information may be time-sensitive as well, like trying to track down a spree shooter. I’m sure you can imagine the hammering they’d get in the press if the FFL that sold guns to the killers and then refused to cooperate with law enforcement until they got a warrant.
Is the “harm” you’re talking about here the deportation of illegal immigrants or something more sinister?
I understand what you’re saying. I just disagree with it. You’re restricting people’s freedom to voluntarily cooperate with law enforcement. I consider those people less free, not more.
Question: Do you imagine that ICE will stop pressuring / coercing employers because of AB450? Do you think all the things that they previously threatened employers with for not cooperating suddenly vanished / became inoperative? I suspect, far from liberating employers from pressure / coercion, the state of California has just stuck them between a rock and a hard place, where they have to choose which punishment the receive: AB450’s fines or whatever the frustrated ICE agents dole out.
You can go ahead and cooperate with law enforcement all you want by providing them with your personal information.
However if I am required to entrust you with my personal information (say, by filling out a job application), I really wouldn’t appreciate you providing that personal information to any random person who happens to feel like poking around. If they really want my personal information, they can ask me for it, or they can get a warrant, or they can fuck off.
Yes, but if you are in a privileged position of having been entrusted information, then that makes it a bit different. There is a reason why certain people like doctors and lawyers not only don’t have to, but are not allowed to reveal info.
If a cop shows up at a doctor’s office demanding information a patient, the doctor may not cooperate with the police without a warrant.
If I, as a person, overhear someone talking about having shoplifted from the store, then I can turn that over. If a person tells their lawyer, then the lawyer may not.
That’s exactly the sort of thing that I would want to prevent. IF the FFL just says, “Sorry, I am not legally allowed to show you this info without a warrant”, then they aren’t taking an adversarial attitude when they decline to volunteer information.
The idea that not volunteering information is taking an adversarial attitude is what sounds pretty orwellian to me.
How long to get a warrant?
Can you imagine that there would be any hammering at all of the medical community in the press if there was a spree shooter, and the psychiatrist who had him in therapy refused to talk to LEO without a warrant? FFL info isn’t as privileged, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t be.
Same as employment info.
Not more sinister. For one, yeah, just because you caught an undocumented worker doesn’t mean that it was worth the means of ignoring that even an undocumented immigrant does have rights. There have been cases against LEO for scooping people up for depression without probable cause. Lawbreakers have rights too. Even murderers have rights; those whose only crime is crossing an arbitrary line on a map without permission shouldn’t have fewer.
Also, there are people who get scooped up that are legal residents or even citizens, or even native born citizens who can trace their family roots back to before columbus. They get detained for a few days, lose their job, suffer reputation damage, suffer personal trauma of being accused and detained for something you didn’t do. That’s real harm as well.
And I feel that law enforcement doesn’t really give you “freedom” to not voluntarily cooperate. As you even have indicated, not volunteering is taking an adversarial attitude towards law enforcement officers, and that doesn’t go well.
Do you really consider yourself “free” to not “volunteer” information to the police if they are threatening to make your life miserable if you do not?
It allows them to answer the question “Why won’t you let us take a look around, do you have something to hide?” With, “It’s the law.”
I’m also free to provide them info about the suspected crimes of others. If I witness a bank robber, I’m free to provide them the license plate of their getaway vehicle. If, for some bizarre reason, the robber whispered his SSN to me before running out the door, I’m free to share that with the police too. There’s no special protection because the information pertains to the law-breaker instead of the person reporting it.
First off, you’re not “required” to fill out a job application. You do that voluntarily. Secondly, there’s a pretty big distinction between “any random person” and law enforcement officers. Thirdly, while you may “appreciate” it, I’m not required to do what you would appreciate or required to not do things that you would not appreciate.
The law only prohibits granting access to nonpublic areas without a warrant. In your analogy, you are free to invite ICE agents into the living room of your house; you cannot, however, invite them into the bedrooms without a warrant (at least, not if they’re there on official business…). Similarly, you most certainly can invite an ICE agent to lunch in a public dining room; you just can’t invite them into the kitchen without a warrant.
But not one’s office, or a conference room, etc.
You keep bringing up the confidentiality of personnel records, but I think we both acknowledge that nobody has been able to identify any law that is a general prohibition on sharing personnel employment records and so forth.
Of course doctors can’t share medical records if they wanted to, because we know that HIPAA generally prohibits exactly this. Of course we know that lawyers aren’t free to share client information, because it is protected by a well-recognized privilege.
If you do not wish to share personnel records absent a court order, my opinion is that is fully up to you, and if you wish not to voluntarily share that information, I support 100% your right to say no in the absence of a search warrant. But if someone else wants to share personnel records of their own company for some reason, I cannot say that they should never be allowed to do so unless there is a search warrant.
To use an extreme example, let’s say an employee of mine gets arrested for being a serial killer. In my opinion, if the cops came and wanted his employee records, I would be highly inclined to cooperate with them absent a search warrant. If you take a different view, that’s totally fine with me as well.
The part I have the most problems with AB450 is regarding being invited onto premises voluntarily. If business owner A wants to tell ICE to go pound sand and come back with a warrant, great. I 100% support his right to do so. But if business owner B wants to invite ICE into non-public areas of his business, I think preventing him from doing so is absurd.
Another question for AB450 supporters: the Fourth Amendment allows police to search people’s property with a warrant, or with permission of the owner (I’m setting aside some other specific types searches that courts have deemed reasonable, of course). Do you think the Fourth Amendment should be changed to prohibit Americans from voluntarily agreeing to searches?
Neither of which were what Bone was objecting to. He was implying they couldn’t even be invited into public areas, which is false.
Sounds like we might need a law to control your behavior. Oh, hey…