Using data the goverment alrady has to catch illegal immigrants

Terrence Jeffrey:

After Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last week secured criminal charges against seven current and former corporate managers and detained 1,187 illegal aliens working for IFCO Systems, a pallet and plastic-container company, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said this was just the first step in a new campaign to strictly enforce the law against large-scale employers of illegal aliens.

"We're going to move beyond the current level of activity to a higher level in each month and year to come," he said.

It's about time.

The IFCO bust was the biggest ever for ICE. But if Chertoff follows through, IFCO may soon seem like just a nice-sized fish in a sea teeming with monstrous scofflaws.

The Social Security Administration (SSA) already knows where the immigration-law-breaking Leviathans lurk. We will soon learn if Congress and the administration really want to catch them.

Last year, I wrote a series of columns and testified on June 21 in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration about the Social Security Administration's Earnings Suspense File (ESF) and how it could be used to enforce the immigration law.

The ESF is where the Social Security Administration puts W-2 reports when the Social Security number on the report does not match the name. According to the Government Accountability Office, the ESF is growing by about 9 million W-2s per year.

This growth is primarily driven by employers who hire illegal aliens and file W-2s on their behalf using either another person's or a fake Social Security number.

Each year, SSA produces an internal list naming every employer that filed 100 or more non-match W-2s the previous year. SSA Spokesman Mark Lassiter told me this week that SSA also sends a notification letter to each employer who filed more than 10 bad W-2s in a year if those bad W-2s exceeded 0.5 percent of the employer's total W-2s.

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There you have it. Follow the earnings.

I have an amnesty proposal for illegal aliens that most conservatives would not object to. Give the aliens a one time amnesty to voluntarily return to Mexico. They could then apply for legal entry and be screened to see if they are elgible for entry. If done in commenctionwith vigorous enforcement like Jeffrey suggest it should lead to self deportation on a grand scale and take care of the ICE job of having to do it.