1/09/01 10:20 a.m.
Why They Are Borking Linda Chavez
Personal destruction and the immigration agenda.

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First

he coverage of Linda Chavez’s Guatemalan house guest demands the question: Had Chavez turned the woman in to the INS the moment she learned her guest wasn’t supposed to be in the country, would the newspapers have carried the headline “Chavez Tossed Refugee Out in the Snow?”

The splashy headlines suggest that a major effort to “bork” Chavez’s nomination for secretary of labor is well underway. Her foes know all too well that Chavez is a symbolic rebuke to every organization that claims to represent the interests of Hispanic-Americans.

Linda Chavez supports official English. That will never do, as far as groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) are concerned. MALDEF has labored for years to convince politicians that all Hispanics oppose official English. (The 1992 National Latino Political Survey demonstrated that the opposite is true, but MALDEF has never let mere facts stand in its way.)

Chavez also opposes affirmative action. MALDEF opposed David Souter’s nomination to the Supreme Court because Souter was not a strong advocate of affirmative action.

It will be interesting to see if MALDEF complains that Linda Chavez should have known her guest was here illegally. You see, MALDEF doesn’t think anyone should ask too many questions about another person’s immigration status.

MALDEF has had considerable success on this front, thanks to its former employee, John Trasvina, who has served as special counsel for immigration-related unfair employment practices in the Clinton-Gore Justice Department.

Congress has required employers to verify that a prospective employee is legally eligible to work in the United States. But — thanks to the Clinton-Gore administration’s interpretation of this law — an employer who asks a new employee to prove legal residency risks a lawsuit. (The Internet site for Trasvina’s office includes a comic book in both Spanish and English; a brochure, You Have the Right to Work, in English, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese; and press releases in both English and Spanish.)

**In April 2000, the Denny’s restaurant chain agreed to pay $89,400 in civil penalties and retrain all its managers nationwide in order to settle a complaint against its San Diego restaurants. Managers had the audacity to demand specific identification documents instead of allowing “newly-hired employees to choose which of several documents they want to produce to prove they are eligible to work here.”

**In March 2000, Townsend Culinary, located in Laurel, Md., agreed to pay $97,000 in civil penalties and contribute $135,000 to a “worker security fund” to settle a case brought by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and prosecuted by Trasvina’s office. The settlement was actually an improvement over a 1999 ruling, which had fined the firm $367,000 and ordered it to pay over $13,400 to two women it fired because the women did not produce “work authorization documents issued by” the INS. John Trasvina said of the 1999 ruling: “Today’s ruling demonstrates that immigrant workers are not alone in fighting job discrimination.”

**In June 1999, Agripac of Salem, Oregon, agreed to pay $45,000 to settle a complaint by the Justice Department that the company “more closely scrutinized valid work documents presented by such individuals [who looked or sounded foreign].” John Trasvina was thrilled, saying a company that insists on valid employment documents “results in lawful workers . . . being subjected to additional burdensome hiring procedures.”

Under Trasvina, even refusing to accept obviously forged documents is risky. Allow me to quote from his department’s list of “Frequently Asked Questions,” also readily available on the Internet: “As long as the documents are allowed by law and appear to be genuine on their face and to relate to the person, they should be accepted” (emphasis added).

Thanks to Trasvina, the law-abiding employer, but not the illegal alien, runs the risk of fines and other punishment.

Trasvina’s department isn’t the only part of the Clinton administration waging an undeclared war against American employers and America’s immigration laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a ruling in October 1999 that gave illegal aliens the power to sue employers who don’t hire them — with the claim that they are victims of discrimination.

These lawsuits and rulings all create a common result: employers who try to keep their workplaces free of illegal aliens can expect to wind up in court. And employers who mistakenly allow an illegal alien on their premises can also end up in court.

MALDEF and its allies have transformed our immigration laws into a “heads I win, tails you lose” game. Now some of the same people who have made our immigration laws impossible to enforce have chosen to try to criminalize Linda Chavez’s act of charity. The politics of personal destruction have sunk to a new low.