I don’t give a crap about what they believe; I care about why they believe it. If a cop arrests a guy and says it’s because he ‘believes’ the guy is guilty, that’s not nearly good enough; I want to know if he’s got evidence — I’m not saying it needs to be conclusive evidence, just some evidence — that it’s so.
They ‘believe’ it was done willfully? Hey, that and a nickel, pal.
It’s not a semantics argument, it is a legal argument.
I am not sure exactly what it is that you are quibbling here, so I’ll unpack it and lay it out.
If someone presents a document that is on list A, then you have to take it. If someone presents a document from list B and from list C, then you have to take it. Those are the documents you must accept. If it’s not on one of those lists, then you don’t take it. If it is on one of those lists, you do. It is not up to the employer to decide which to accept and which not to accept.
If they are rejecting documents because they do not believe that they are genuine, then they must explain what exactly it is that they detected about the document that made it appear to be fraudulent. They can’t just say, “I didn’t think it looked real.” If management is telling them to accept any documents unless the hiring manager can articulate exactly what it is that makes them doubt its authenticity, then that is following the law.
Sure, it is not against the law to reject a handwritten note from the employee’s mother attesting that he is a citizen or an SS card written in crayon, and it would be against the law to take it, but that is not the sort of thing I thought was being referred to here.
No, I read the whole thing. I was pointing out that the only people who would be arrested and possibly charged would be the low level managers who accepted the documents presented in good faith.
Yeah, sometimes they get caught, but as much of it as I see, and as long as some of these places have been in “business”, it is a rather small risk. Interesting anecdote I heard from one of my employees who worked at an under the table groomer for a bit. An employee got bit, badly, and wasn’t covered by worker’s comp, as she wasn’t technically an employee. That turned into a nightmare (that she deserved) for the owner.
Yeah, you do have to prove that they knowingly did it. There are ways, if there is a memo that says, “Hire anyone, regardless of what paperwork they bring in, and just fake it.” then that is a smoking gun that would be useable in prosecuting.
If the managers or owners were involved in a conspiracy to get fraudulent documents to these employees, then that is something that is also perfectly prosecutable. If they have a printing machine in the back popping out fake IDs and SS cards, then lock them the hell up.
But, to tell a hiring manager that they are breaking the law if they accept fraudulent documents, but also that they are breaking the law if they question documents presented in good faith that are reasonably genuine and relate to the employee is to put that person into an impossible situation.
And the bank and any financial institution will be more than happy to provide you with training and supplies to do so. If you suspect that the bill is fake, and refuse to take it, if it turns out to be real, you suffer no more than a bit of embarrassment. (Speaking of which, fun way to get yourself banned from a bar, tell people that detecting counterfeit money is easy, as real money won’t burn.)
But can you tell me what steps you would take to verify the authenticity of a 25 year old, slightly tattered certificate of live birth signed by a midwife from Otero County, New Mexico? If you refuse to take it, and it turns out to be real, you have broken the law and are open to a discrimination lawsuit.
They don’t ask for more than one. They ask for one item from list A, or one each from list B and C, and it is up to the employee to decide which to use.
If you ask for more than that, you are breaking the law.
Also, if you copy IDs, you must copy all IDs. Not just the ones that you think are suspicious.
Take a look at your SS card sometime, and without going into detail as to the process, tell me how hard you really think it would be to make a fake that appears to be reasonably genuine. Now look at your birth certificate, how hard do you think it would be to fake that? Sure, it’s got a seal, do you know all the seals of all the counties of all the states?
So, someone hands you a School ID with a photo, and a birth certificate from New Mexico. What steps do you take next? Personally, I will follow the law and copy the relevant info from those documents into the I-9. Would you do any differently?
Sure, the files should be examined, and any chronic errors should be corrected and fined, and any fraud should be prosecuted. But, unless they were both knowingly breaking the law and phenomenally stupid, there would be little in the employee files that would indicate such.
But I wouldn’t doubt that there are errors. There are always errors or missed reverifications. That’s why there are HR companies that you can pay to audit your I-9’s and find and correct them before they are found and corrected by someone that will fine you for them. While fines are an appropriate way to ensure that companies are doing due diligence and correcting most errors, criminal charges seem excessive.
Okay, so the investigation finds the “smoking memo”, and it says, “Due to recent discrimination lawsuits that we lost, we are reminding hiring managers that they must follow the law, and accept any documents presented in good faith and that reasonably appear to be genuine and relate to the individual presenting them. You must err on the side of the employee, and I say this with only a small amount of hyperbole, unless it is written in crayon, you must accept it as reasonably genuine.”
Who do you think should be locked up? The person who wrote the memo telling hiring managers to follow the law, or the person who followed it?
Now, as a speculative hypothetical, lets say that the hiring managers are still suspicious of these employees, so, while they accept the documents, they also forward them on to ICE. ICE then waits until they see that there are at least a few hundred potentially unauthorized workers before they conduct the raid. In that hypothetical, which, while is not necessarily or even likely to be the case, is not ruled out from the information that we have, would you still feel that some managers need to be perp-walked?
I stated the law, and provided a cite. You seem to be arguing that there is no way to comply with both immigration and nondiscrimination laws, and that is false. It may be difficult, but the way the laws are written it is not impossible. You are also just saying, without any citation or quoting statute or a case, that certain actions are discrimination, and you are making up legal standards that don’t exist. (Where did your good faith standard come from?). You’ve also stated the legal requirement for what documents an employer must accept a couple of different ways. So, no, I’m not going to parse through your post and point out where you’ve mischaracterized what I said, and where you’ve misstated the law, or made up a legal standard that doesn’t exist.
Do you have a cite for needing to explain exactly why a document is being rejected?
Also, no, you don’t need a smoking memo to convict anyone. There are lots of ways to prove that people on the company side knew. I outlined several already. Other ways are if most of the hires never presented documents, or some documents were such obvious fakes that anyone would know they were fraudulent.
No, I am saying that you cannot comply with nondiscrimination laws and also be accountable the way that people in this thread want them to be held to account. The current laws are perfectly easy to comply with, it is the changes to the law that are being discussed in this thread that are problematic.
I didn’t think I needed to cite anything, as all this information is actually in the cite that you already provided. This is all information that can be obtained on any copy of an I-9. Good faith is a very common standard.
I’m not sure what you mean by I presented it in a couple of different ways. I outlined what the I-9 says, and yes, it does have a couple of different ways to present documents. I have no idea what your complaint is here.
I unpacked your assumptions and mischaracterizations, and layed out what I am saying very clearly. Your post then goes and creates new assumptions and mischaracterizations out of whole cloth. I have no idea what you are even objecting to in my post, as your post doesn’t address anything that I’ve said.
Of course you cannot parse through my post to point out where I’ve mischaracterized what you’ve said, I’ve not characterized anything you’ve said in any way, simply explained my position. And of course, you are not going to state where I’ve misstated a law, or made up a legal standard, because while you might like making that accusation, you actually cannot do so.
https://www.uscis.gov/faq-page/i-9-central-questions-about-documents#t17077n46954
So, yes, unless you can point out what is wrong with it, you have to accept it. What other possible standard could there be?
I outline a few in my post as well.
Damifino - making that determination is not part of my current job. Yes, that is an issue. A very real one. It was just a couple months ago someone in the DMV accused me of having a fake birth certificate because mine is a 50+ year old piece of paper that shows its age, among other things. And I’ve encountered more than one person who thinks New Mexico or Hawaii aren’t part of the US. Absolutely better training would be a plus, and in the case of birth certificates you have a kajillion different versions in every language in the world so really, I’m not that sure why they’re accepted as proof of identity sometimes.
Every job I’ve been hired at for the past… well, since the beginning of the 1990’s, at least, has made copies of my identity documents. This is NOT a big deal, a lot of companies were already doing it before the law was passed.
Honestly, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to counterfeit identity documents. I’m assuming it would be easier than counterfeiting money.
Oh, no, it’s worse than that, my friend.
It’s every county of every state AND the independent cities that are NOT located in a county (I was born in one of them - hence the occasional contention about my birth certificate as it does not list a county because I was not born in a county) AND the boroughs of New York City which also are a bit different AND the birth certificates of every protectorate/territory/etc. of the US AND the same for every single country/county/province/city/other administrative division on the entire planet. In all possible languages. Because you’re talking about immigrants who, by definition, were born outside the US.
I’m not talking about prosecuting for just a few errors in hundreds or thousands or more applications/hire files. I’m talking about blatant, repeated, systematic problems. ANY audit worth its salt will turn up errors, but there is a difference between “actual error” and “fraud”.
It’s not a part of a hiring managers job either.
As to the reason that they are accepted, well, that is in some cases, the only form of ID people have, and it is the first form of ID anyone has. SS cards may be more standardized, but it’s not like they are actually hard to copy.
But, as it is accepted, and is on the I-9 list C, then you must accept it as an employer. And it is not proof of identity, it is proof of authorization. The identification from list B is the proof of identity.
There is no law that requires keeping copies. The law has been for a while now that you don’t have to keep copies, but if you do, you have to keep copies on everyone.
I’d assume so as well. I’m just saying, it’s not that hard to create documents that very easily pass the “reasonable” test.
Yeah, so it makes it a bit hard to prove that someone was being fraudulent in accepting documents, as opposed to not recognizing that the seal of Greenlee County Arizona doesn’t have enough tentacles coming out of its head.
Though I will say, as far as foreign birth certificates, as the point would be to be claiming US citizenship, they would be presenting you with US documents for that at least.
I don’t disagree, I just don’t think that such fraud is likely to turn up in the employee files. Either they were doing the level of diligence that they are allowed to do, and a whole bunch of people took advantage of those low standards of proof of authorization, or they were doing something far more nefarious, conspiring with them to provide false documents, in which case, the records will be fine, and it will be other avenues to go after them for fraud and counterfeiting.
Thank you! I’ve been whacking that Koch brothers mole for a few days.
Here’s what the USCIS has to say about the matter:
When completing section 2 of the Form I-9, I’ve only rejected photocopies except for one case where someone brought me a metal Social Security Card. The employee said that in his entire life I was the only person who refused to accept it as a valid document. He ended up using his birth certificate instead.
What about American citizens born in another country - like John McCain (Panama)? If a birth certificate has information on the citizenship of a parent that might be pertinent to the question of whether or not someone is born an American citizen.
Fair enough, not something I had considered.
The Fortune 500 company division I was once employed by had much of the physical labor jobs filled by undocumented Mexicans.
Step one was using a temp agency for most of them; they were removed from the documentation check right there.
We would generally shut down for 2-3 weeks at the end of the year for maintenance, improvements and such. We had a the time to work on idle lines, and more than half of everyone laid off would go home to Mexico for a while.
My first year one of the former temps, now ‘real’ employees, walked in to HR and said, effectively, this is my real name and info and here are my documents. With no questions asked, they made the change. It may have helped that he was popular and a hot runner. I don’t know where he got the real, but not really his, original documents. But making a case for prosecuting the company does not sound easy.
If all these from-elsewhere people have such amazing, iron-clad, extraordinary fake documentation how does anyone have sufficient knowledge of their fraud to arrest them in the first place? Or is it just round up all the brown people and worry about that detail later?
My guess is Social Security numbers that don’t match official records. That’s hardly extraordinary documentation, but the employer won’t necessarily know whereas it’s a flag for the feds.
Also wearing ICE electronic-monitoring anklets while working is pretty good evidence for ICE.
Haven’t really read through the OP, but the answer to this is complex. In some cases, companies pay workers under the table to avoid taxes. Certainly, regardless of whether those workers are legal or illegal, that company has some 'splaining to do. However, there is also a huge black market for illegal documentation that factors into this. I found this article that seems to address a lot of the OP:
So what you’re saying is that if there’s evidence that there are some people working illegally at a location, it’s fine to arrest all of the brown people even if you end up having to release over half of them the next day when a judge actually examines your evidence, and even if there was zero evidence at the time of arrest of any particular one doing wrong. But if there’s evidence that there are a bunch of people working illegally at the facility, there’s absolutely no way that said evidence that’s enough to arrest every brown person who works there is enough to arrest anyone in management at all, because clearly they must have no idea that over half of their workforce is working illegally?
Also while you may not give a crap what they believe, the standard for a legal arrest in the US is only ‘probable cause’, it doesn’t actually require any evidence whatsoever. An arrest based purely on a cop observing suspicious circumstances (like a workplace where they’re confident more than half the workforce is not working legally) or criminal behavior is fine, even though there isn’t actually solid evidence of anything.
But it’s not, AFAIK, actually against the law to employ folks who are here illegally; if the ‘suspicious circumstances’ give rise to confidence that illegal aliens make up half of the employees, then I get how that — by itself — lets us make a probable-cause argument to round up people we have reason to believe are illegal aliens (which is against the law), but I don’t get how — by itself — it lets us argue that we have good reason to believe the employers are actually breaking a law.
If the cop has reason to believe — I’m not just asking whether he believes it, I’m asking if he’s got reason to believe it — that the employers did it knowingly, then, sure, there’s an argument to be made, and I’ll make it. But if, when launching the raid, all he’s got reason to believe is that the employers were doing something legal? I get how an honest cop can swear, under oath, that he arrested those employees due to the circumstances; you can ask him if he already had reason to believe they were breaking the law, and he can say, what, ‘yes, there was evidence that maybe half of them were illegal aliens; saw it with my own two eyes, I did!’
But ask him, of the employers: did you have reason to believe they hired those illegal aliens knowingly? And he’ll say, what, that he has no idea? That he saw no evidence it was done knowingly, but went ahead with the arrest anyway?
Well, so you know in the future…
Yes, it IS illegal to hire people who are not properly authorized to work in the US. That means either they are a citizen, or they have a work authorization (“green card”). Otherwise, if you hire them you break the law.
“knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien”
You’ve been told this already in this thread and it’s in your link. So it’s not clear at this point if you don’t understand it or are deliberately ignoring it.
It’s a fine line. If an employer brings people on through a temp agency and one or two employees fudged their credentials with the agency, said employer probably doesn’t know that. However, if an employer has, say, a chicken processing plant and the feds come in and rouund up hundreds of line workers, that employer knew damn well what was happening. And in most situations the employees there will be too intimidated to fight back against shitty work conditions, and the employer allows the employment scenario to continue and make money, so a raid doesn’t happen in the first place.
