Number of raids on illegal workers declining

When federal agents who swept into Wal-Marts across the country and arrested 245 floor cleaners, they were reviving an increasingly rare practice.

Politics and economics weaned the federal government from workplace crackdowns of illegal employees years ago. The government has busted steadily fewer employers and arrested fewer illegal employees since the late 1990s, according to federal immigration data.

Immigration officials often attribute the marked decline in workplace enforcement to a new focus on national security, saying that agents who once raided restaurant kitchens and construction sites have been reassigned to airports and nuclear plants.

But in fact the decline began four years before Sept. 11, 2001, as the frenetic economy drew foreign nationals into bottom-rung jobs Americans wouldn't take, and as federal immigration policy-makers focused on deporting criminals and fortifying the U.S.-Mexican border.

On some occasions when agents did swoop in, lawmakers howled to protect important business constituencies.

An estimated three million new workers entered the United States during the economic boom, many of them legally. But many of the most backbreaking jobs went to those who crossed the border without papers. And while the law says undocumented immigrants cannot work, a flourishing gray market says welcome.

An Associated Press analysis of federal immigration data tracks the drop in workplace enforcement:

The average number of completed employer investigations fell from 6,100 a year during the 1990s to 1,900 a year over the past three years -- a 70 percent decline. The average number of employers fined for having undocumented workers fell from 1,025 to 110.

While more than 200,000 businesses are believed to employ undocumented workers, according to the General Accounting Office, only 53 employers were fined in fiscal year 2002.

An average of 200 workers were arrested each week during the 1990s, peaking with 340 workers in fiscal 1997; since fiscal year 2000, arrests have averaged 12 a week.

As recently as 1998, the equivalent of 344 full-time agents worked on employer investigations; by fiscal 2001 that number had fallen to 124, according to the GAO. While there's no separate line item in the immigration budget for workplace enforcement, officials say they had less agents because funding declined over the years.

Some immigration officials in Washington warn against concluding that workplace raids have been all but abandoned, particularly since the Immigration and Naturalization Service was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security this spring.

The Wal-Mart raids, which took place Oct. 23 and netted mostly employees of cleaning subcontractors, are a prominent example.

But raids on mom-and-pop shops are now less common, in part because investigators use subtler techniques such as cross-referencing employer records with federal databases to reveal concentrations of illegal workers, Courtney said.

Immigration data do show that in recent years a greater portion of criminal cases are completed, and closed cases are increasingly likely to end with successful prosecutions.

Still, the fraction of businesses hiring undocumented workers that pay any penalty is minute.

The new priority has been to focus federal efforts on worker smuggling, sweatshop exploitation and instances in which undocumented workers displace U.S. workers.