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Show unwelcomed guests the door

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 20, 2009

If you come here from another country for a vacation, you'll face close scrutiny coming in but very little going out.

Lax exit review means the United States can only guess at how many foreign visitors have overstayed their visas. The best guess is that about 40 percent of 11 million immigrant visitors stay here beyond their official welcome. Many never leave.

That's millions of men, women and children here without official permission. The lure for many of them is a U.S. paycheck.

No one can say the United States is serious about controlling immigration until Congress devotes the resources necessary to identify visitors who illegally work in legal jobs.

The debate over what to do about undocumented workers often gets bogged down in the impossibility of rounding up and deporting millions of otherwise law-abiding folks. Anyone advocating that approach just hasn't clearly pictured the potential chaos.

Even the much smaller goal of checking everyone out as they depart through ports, airports and highway crossings has posed daunting challenges.

What would be done with folks who have tickets to fly home but have misplaced a key document or have a paperwork discrepancy? Should authorities refuse to let them to leave the country?

But the fact that the United States doesn't even know which foreign visitors have violated their departure deadlines has become an invitation to abuse the system. A solution exists that doesn't involve long lines and onerous checks at every international airport.

The key is simply to cut off the pay of workers with phony credentials.

Everyone, even U.S. citizens, needs a Social Security number to work. Every dollar you earn is taxed and recorded under your name by the Social Security Administration. Spotting duplicate or unauthorized numbers should not be difficult.

Foreigners here with tourist visas are not allowed to get paid while on their U.S. vacations. That's the law and it should be enforced.

The crux of the immigration problem regarding workers is this simple: Visitors who want to work should have to get a work visa. For those who don't, a red flag should automatically get raised by Social Security or the IRS.

Some employers and many immigrant advocates don't want strict enforcement. Their only legitimate complaint is that thousands of workers might lose their jobs, or at least be temporarily laid off, because of inaccuracies that have shown up in the data base currently used for the voluntary E-Verify system.

But as the Heritage Foundation correctly observes, "Nearly all erroneous tentative non-confirmations are the result of simple errors in the databases, such as misspelled names, maiden names, clerical errors in date of birth, missing date of birth, and, most commonly, missing naturalization data."

All of that is fixable.

The only real issue is whether the United States is serious about immigration control or not.

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