Audit uncovers illegal immigrants

Canton, Miss., has been awfully quiet in the past few weeks, thanks largely to the Social Security Administration, according to Sheriff Toby Trowbridge.

“It’s been a ghost town down at the trailer park,” the Madison County sheriff said last week.

The Social Security Administration notified Peco Foods Inc. that the Social Security numbers of at least 200 employees were not valid, and the company let the workers go earlier this month.

Sheriff Trowbridge threatened to arrest the laid-off workers who lived in the Westside Trailer Park next to the plant on suspicion of being illegal immigrants. Since then, however, most of them have disappeared, he said.

“They are illegal, and they were going to have to go on to someplace else, whether it’s back to Mexico or just move on,” the sheriff said. “We were having trouble with illegals in the community for a long time before this came about.”

The SSA issued 900,000 similar warnings, or “No Match” letters, to companies nationwide last year. This was a record for the agency.

But this year, after an outcry from immigration groups, SSA is cutting to 130,000 the number of such warnings it will send and dropping threatening language that warned of fines against companies for providing incorrect numbers.

The letters caused “tens of thousands of workers to lose their jobs over the last six to eight years, contributed to a climate of fear and repression in immigrant communities, and caused employers widespread confusion,” according to the National Immigration Law Center.

SSA spokesman Mark Lassiter said the reduction in warnings this year is not in response to complaints from employers and employees. “We are just trying to balance the use of our resources versus the cost of sending letters out and based on the volume of corrections,” he said.

Mr. Lassiter could not give the number of corrections employers had provided last year and said only that “the percentage of corrections was very low.”

Since 1937, the SSA has deposited unclaimed payroll tax money into a special fund, which, according to the agency’s inspector general, grew to $374 billion in 2000.

There are an estimated 8 million illegal aliens in the country, but there are no figures on how many are employed, said a spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Peco’s employees in Mississippi were not questioned about their legal status but were told to resolve the mismatch with the SSA to keep their jobs, the company said in a written statement to The Washington Times.

Some employees “immediately ceased coming to work, while others worked up until the deadline,” the company said. “Apparently, none of the affected employees who were asked to contact the SSA did, in fact, do so, as none of those individuals returned … with any explanation as to why the discrepancy in the Social Security information existed.”

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