Obama to Announce New Employment Compliance Office

Little known fact: more Latinos have been deported during the Obama administration than in each of the Bush (43rd) years. In 2010 more than 400 thousand Latinos were detained and sent back to their homeland, that’s 10 percent more than in 2008 and 25 percent more than in 2007.

The difference, aside form the obvious increase in the raw numbers, is the approach. Bush went after the worker with sweeping immigrant raids while Obama is going after the employer in a quieter way. According to the Wall Street Journal:

In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2010, ICE conducted audits of more than 2,740 companies, nearly twice as many as the previous year. The agency levied a record $7 million in civil fines on businesses that employed illegal workers.

Obama’s undocumented immigrant enforcement actions have gone mostly unnoticed, until today when he plans to go public (or at least as public as he has been on this matter).

Obama will unveil an Employment Compliance Inspection Center that’s supposed to verify American’s worker status by checking I-9 documents.

Think of these as quiet raids done by paper-pushers with laptops instead of law enforcers with handcuffs. The result will likely be more of the same, but with an added twist: whereas Bush turned a blind eye to illegal employers Obama is going to prosecute them.

Opponents call these paper enforcement tactics “silent raids” that are bad for business. Slate.com makes the point that the Obama silent raids’ focus is harmful:

They (raids) often target agricultural and manufacturing companies that have trouble attracting American workers, and, according to critics, unfairly punish small businesses that don’t have the resources to police their employees.

The President is set to announce that his new office of  compliance inspections has begun with a trial program. Already Tyson Foods, the gargantuan chicken processing company, has voluntarily joined the effort. But the plan is to move from a voluntary program to an obligatory one.

I wonder what the right will have to say about this government expanding, socialist sounding, business hampering, resource draining new initiative.