Bye to Scorched Earth

Two promising developments in U.S. immigration policy.

First, the Obama administration said it would stop targeting just illegal immigrants and focus more on the employers who hire and exploit them. Good up to a point, but with caveats aplenty necessary.

Under the last couple years of the Bush administration — during which some 6,000 people were rounded up in workplace raids but only about 135 of these were supervisors or employers — it seemed as though we were all to believe that these immigrants had given themselves jobs.

Second, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously saw through attempts to criminalize undocumented status in this country.

Good again. Splitting families through deportation is terrorizing enough without adding criminal charges. The court recognized that using a fake Social Security card to get a job is a far cry from ferreting out someone else's number to defraud that person.

Both events signal a departure from the scorched earth practices that immigration authorities and local prosecutors have been pursuing.

But the change in policy last week at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency does not go far enough.

The president should sign an executive order freezing all workplace raids until workable immigration policy occurs. And the added emphasis on employers should recognize that an error-proof system for employers to verify legal work status for potential employees does not yet exist.

Still, the Obama administration adds needed balance by making workplace detentions mostly part of efforts to build cases against employers who knowingly hire and exploit immigrant workers.

The Supreme Court ruled on May 4 that workers who use fake identification numbers to work must know they belong to a real person before they can be charged with aggravated identity theft. Prosecutors had used the threat to exact guilty pleas to lesser charges of document fraud.

Immigration policy is so broken that workers would rather risk arrest and deportation than navigate a backlogged system whose job is seemingly only to say "no." And criminalizing hunger for a job is tantamount to punishing workers this country has needed.

The Obama administration is slowly building a consensus toward meaningful immigration reform. Not soon enough for our tastes.

REPRINTED FROM THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL.

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