Homeland Security is making a show of cracking down on employers of illegals, but without raids. They told members of Congress Wednesday that they’d just sent notices to 652 business that their personnel records would be audited to look for illegal workers (as opposed to 503 such notices sent to businesses in all of last year). Obviously, this is part of the administration’s amnesty campaign — the spoonful of enforcement to help the amnesty go down. And I’m happy to see it. But . . . this doesn’t tell us anything about a commitment to future enforcement. And that’s not just my cussedness talking. In 1998–1999, Janet Reno’s INS launched exactly the same kind of effort, called Operation Vanguard, which audited all the meatpacking plants in Nebraska in an effort to have a more orderly and thorough enforcement strategy. (There’s a description of the operation, and how it turned out, about halfway down this Washington Post article.) It was meant to be repeated every few months to wean the businesses off use of illegal workers. But the businesses, churches, politicans, et al. went bonkers and it was stopped and the initiator fired from the INS.

This is why no one-time performance should convince anyone of the administration’s commitment to enforcement. Only after new enforcement tools have been institutionalized can such a claim be made — for instance, mandatory use of E-Verify by all employers, and not a promise to do that but actually phasing in the program over a period of several years and overcoming court challenges. Only then is legalization even a legitimate topic for debate.