Critical mass builds as sine die approaches

So here we are, with legislative sessions winding up. The National Conference of State Legislators released a report last week that pretty much stated that immigration laws are the new black: more than 1,100 bills have been considered in 44 states.

Most of them fail. So far, 26 state have enacted 44 laws on the issue, according to the report. This includes Mississippi’s Employment Protection Act.

But as we get closer to sine die, the final week of the various bodies legislative, we’re beginning to see things heat up. In Arizona, the state Senate has passed a bill that gives the business community a little more control over the Legal Arizona Workers Act last year (and, if passed and signed by the governor, would head off a harder-line citizens’ initiative). In Rhode Island, a mandatory E-Verify bill had its vote pushed back to next week (last month, the governor signed a resolution that all state agencies and private companies doing business with the state had to use E-Verify; Utah passed a similar law earlier this spring).  And in South Carolina, a bruising legislative battle over use of E-Verify is coming to a head.

None of this is surprising, of course.  The NCSL counts 179 of the 1,106 immigration-related bills as dealing with the topic of “employment.”

As critical mass builds, it will be interesting to watch which direction the energy moves. The Arizona bill passed last year and being revised this year was unfriendly to employers but didn’t really penalize illegal workers. The Mississippi law is somewhat unfriendly to employers and would throw illegal workers in prison for up to five years.  The question on our minds is this: Will the energy in these bills go towards penalizing the employers, or penalizing the employees?

Story from the trenches: When state laws slam into federal rules

This dispatch from the mean streets of Phoenix:

One of our clients hired a woman and, complying with Legal Arizona Workers law and the E-Verify rules, ran her through the database within three days of hire.

She had recently gotten married and used her married name in the application. But she hadn’t changed her information with the Social Security Administration. Not surprisingly, E-Verify returned a tentative non-confirmation. Our system provided the forms needed and she headed over to the local SSA office.

They changed her information in the system. Told her they’d send her a new SSN. And told her it was OK in 24 hours to resubmit her case.

The business did. And she came up with another tentative non-confirmation. A call to the SSA. “No, you’re in the system. Give it a day or so.”

Two days later, another submission attempt. Another tentative non-confirmation. Federal rules state that she can’t be fired during the allowed 10-day resolution period. But now those 10 days are up, and despite SSA assurances, she’s termed out. If the company keeps her on, they’ve essentially committed the same sin in the State of Arizona’s eyes as if they knowingly hired an illegal employee and kept them on despite the non-resolution of a tentative non-confirmation.

This is what happens when the state law — a non-positive in E-Verify equals a presumptive illegal worker or a hell of a lot of paperwork explaining why the worker’s legal — crashes into both federal rules and bureaucracy.

The final resolution: We called the E-Verify folks and found that the system hadn’t released the initial report. So we killed out the report, the company re-ran the employee, she came back “SSA employment authorized” and she’s working again.