Activists Win Court Battle on Measure to Restrain Hiring of Illegal Aliens

A challenge was filed last year to ballot language certified by the Oregon attorney general.

The ballot measure, Initiative Petition 52 (2016) (IP 52), will be submitted to Oregon voters soon. If passed, IP 52 would require businesses with five or more employees to confirm that their employees are actually legally eligible to work. The measure was the work-product of Oregonians for Immigration Reform (OFIR).

The issue of illegal aliens working in local communities is not a small one for the Beaver State. Recent figures show that around five percent of the state’s workforce is illegal. Unemployment figures for black youth, for example, is as high as 55 percent.

In the ruling by the Oregon Supreme Court (attached below), Justice Rives Kistler writing for the court en banc notes that “Federal immigration law makes it unlawful for ‘a person or other entity *** to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien.’”

The Court agreed with OFIR’s President Cynthia Kendoll that the state’s attorney general’s certified ballot language would be both defective and misleading to Oregon voters.

The attorney general, the opinion noted, wrote and certified the ballot language in a way that put too much emphasis on the new conditions proposed for obtaining and maintaining business licenses. Moreover, the Oregon attorney general was found to have failed to communicate the actual effect of the proposed law, i.e., that a potential employee’s eligibility documents will have to be confirmed by E-Verify, a federal website which verifies important information like one’s social security number.

Other states already have verification programs similar to the one being proposed in Oregon.

State efforts to curb employment of illegal aliens was given the green-light in 2011 by the United States Supreme Court when an employee-verification law in Arizona was challenged. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, Hispanic nationalist organizations and the Obama Justice Department, were fighting the effort. The open-borders coalition, which ultimately lost, challenged Arizona’s law as an impermissible regulation of immigration permissibly regulated only by the federal government, the U.S. Congress.

After the Arizona law was initially passed, reports began to surface of fears of a mass exodus of mostly Mexican illegal aliens going back to Mexico, in particular to the Mexican state of Sonora. Sonora is located in Northwest Mexico and shares a border with California, Arizona, and New Mexico. The reverse-flood sparked outrage among Mexican officials who traveled to the Arizona governor’s office to complain that their own labor markets and public resources could not handle the Mexican nationals that were returning. Mexican officials said it would have a devastating effect on the Mexican state.

Average wages in America are estimated to be ten times higher than those in Mexico and this fact has been referred to by experts as one of the “three magnets” for illegal immigration. The other two “magnets” are birthright citizenship and welfare benefits. Financial motivations are unquestionably a driving-force for illegal immigration.

According to a report by the Migration Policy Institute, “Migration from Mexico to the United States is primarily economically motivated. Nominal wage differentials have been hovering for years at about a 10-to-1 ratio, in favor of the United States, for manual and semi-skilled jobs. Moreover, a dynamic U.S. economy led to a strong demand for workers in seasonal agriculture, high-turnover manufacturing, construction, and the service industry. On the Mexican side, there have been enormous economic transformations, but not pronounced enough to absorb the growing working-age population.”

Measures such as E-Verify are viewed not only as important for protecting the living standards of Americans, they are also seen as key to ending social security and ID-fraud, a little-reported but major problem created when illegal aliens try to “pose” as eligible legal workers.

The Social Security Administration has estimated that around 75 percent of illegal “undocumented” aliens have actually obtained social security numbers, mostly by stealing them from U.S. citizens and legal residents. Researchers have found that the large majority of those whose numbers are stolen (mostly by underground gangs) are American children; thus, the theft goes unnoticed for years.

Commenting on the Oregon high court’s decision, OFIR’s co-counsel, Dale Wilcox of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) told Breitbart Texas, “The ballot language written and certified by the attorney general hid the true purpose and effect of the initiative and would have only served to confuse voters.”

IRLI is a D.C.-based immigration-control advocate that helped write Arizona’s E-Verify law.

As reported by Breitbart Texas, IRLI is also fighting efforts by illegal aliens to get drivers licenses. The lawsuit in Oregon involves attempts by illegal aliens to nullify a successful 2014 ballot measure which sought to block efforts by the state legislature and governor to give driver’s cards to illegal aliens.

Wilcox calls this win in the employment verification case a victory for immigration-control advocates and the working people of Oregon.

Lana Shadwick is a writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. She has served as an associate judge and prosecutor in Texas. Follow her on Twitter LanaShadwick2