Maybe I should get excited about Jerry Brown’s premature October Surprise that Meg Whitman had an illegal-alien housekeeper, but I can’t. Whitman complied with the law by filling out an I-9 form, using the fake or stolen Social Security number given to her by Nicky Diaz Santillan, a citizen of Mexico; nine years later, as soon Diaz admitted to lying to Whitman, Whitman fired her.
What is now known as E-Verify was not ready for prime time when Diaz was hired in 2000, and few employers even knew about it. And if Whitman had peered too closely at Diaz’s information and demanded further proof of legal status, the Justice Department might very well have gone after her for discrimination, through something called the “Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices,” which routinely sues employers who try to avoid hiring illegal aliens.
The key question is whether Whitman received a “no-match” letter from the Social Security Administration notifying her that there was a problem with the maid’s SSN. Diaz’s lawyer, the sleazy Gloria Allred, insists she received such a letter in 2003, but apart from the fact that Diaz was the one who collected the mail every day, there’s a problem with Allred’s claim. As I understand it, the Social Security Administration doesn’t send no-match letters to employers with just one employee. As this 2007 report puts it:
“No-match” letters are sent to employers who have more than 10 discrepancies in their submitted W-2 forms, and whose number of unmatched W-2 forms represents more than 0.5 percent (one half of one percent) of the total W-2 forms reporterd by the employer.
If Whitman employed ten people at her home, and they all were illegal aliens, then maybe she would have gotten a no-match letter, but that seems improbable. Or maybe the Social Security Administration doesn’t always follow its guidelines or changes the guidelines — if anyone out there has information on that, please let me know.
But I think the more likely answer is that Diaz picked up the mail one day, saw in it the annual Social Security Administration summary of earnings for Whitman (you get one every year, too, and you should open it up and check it), and just assumed from the sender that it was a no-match letter (or was later prompted to conclude that by Allred).
Maybe there’s more to the story, and if so, I’m all ears. But what we know now, far from implicating Whitman, raises two uncomfortable questions for the open-borders folks: First, when is Diaz scheduled to be deported? (Okay, that’s a rhetorical question.) And second, whose Social Security number did she steal? Doesn’t anyone care to find out if it belonged to, say, some American kid who now can’t get a student loan because an illegal alien ruined his credit record?