The Paris News from Paris, Texas • Page 24

Th.PBrhN.wt, Aug. 24. 1981 5c Proposal aimed at stoppingflow of illegal aliens 1978, Immigration and for each illegal net-son nn i mm WASHINGTON Restaurateur Ulysses Auger bristles at suggestion that the workers in his kitchen, chattering among themselves in Spanish, may be illegal aliens. "What illegal aliens?" he protests. AH his employees produce Social Security cards and numbers when they are hired, he insists.

Does he know that the cards and numbers are genuine? "As long as it looks legitimate, we don't ask any questions," he says. Auger, owner of Washington's popular "Blackie's House of Beef" 56 other restaurants, has had his problems on that issue. In 1978, Immigration and Naturalization Service agents raided Blackie's at lunchtime and caught 14 illegal aliens among the crew. Auger got a court order prohibiting the INS from raiding his place without specific warrants That suit is still being contested. Now the Reagan administration, grabbing at any means to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants, is proposing a law that would change the way Auger and thousands of other employers do business.

The new law would, for the first time, make it a federal offense for an employer to hire illegal aliens knowingly. It would subject employers to a $1,000 fine for each illegal person on their payrolls. The proposal, Attorney General William French Smith says, was difficult for him to support at first. But after studying the immigration problem, Smith concluded that employer sanctions were "the only credible additional enforcement device left to us." "As long as illegal aliens can find jobs in the United States at wages six or seven times those paid in their country, they will be drawn to this country," Smith said. Employer sanctions are not a new idea.

The House passed them in 1974, but the Senate balked. The Carter administration recommended them in 1977. A Select Commission on Immigration recommended them to Congress earlier this year. Studies have that the jobs taken by illegal aliens are less and less on the farms and ranches of the Southwest and more and more in businesses like Blackie's in cities where millions of unemployed Americans already live. Businessmen like Auger, who employs 2,000 people, have reason to like hiring foreigners.

"They work hard," he says, "Tor wages slightly over the federal minimum. They also do not form unions. That's important to Auger, a man whose distaste for the restaurant workers union is indicated by an enlargement of a Washington Post article framed on his office wall. The article links the union to organized crime. Business -groups are leading the opposition to the Reagan proposal.

"We think it's an unconscionable burden," says Christopher Luis of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Employers are being singled out." Hispanic groups are also against the proposal. The League of United Latin American Citizens suggests the government improve enfogvbment of existing wage and safety laws. LULAC feels that many employers hire illegals because they can flout those laws without worrying about worker complaints, said spokesman Arnold Torres Others say the Reagan proposal wouldn't work because it does not solve the problem of how an employer is to identify which applicants are legally entitled to work.

The identification question has been a stumbling block for proponents of employer sanctions. Hispanic groups fear that without some means of identification, employers might refuse to hire anyone who looked or sounded foreign, including Mexican-American citizens. The Select Commission on Immigration recommended establishing a universal card to identify legal workers, as did the Reagan administration's task force on immigration. The trouble ib that any such universal card could easily be counterfeited The White House rejected the recommendation and proposed instead that workers be required to show employers only two identifying documents, such as a driver's license or a Social Security card, and to sign a certificate saying they were legal workers. Reagan rejected the universal identification card "because it smacked of a national identity card," explained a White House official NOTICE Weekly Contest Still Going On.

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