Homeland Security Manages To Tick Off The Unions And The Chamber Of Commerce

A rare feat detailed in this article from CQ Politics (subscription required):

The Department of Homeland Security may not have the authority to issue a new rule aimed at reducing the hiring of illegal immigrants, according to the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who may go to court to stop the rule.
On Friday, DHS is expected to announce regulations requiring employers to take additional steps to confirm certain employees are authorized to work in the United States. An employer who fails to follow the rules could be fined for knowingly employing an illegal immigrant.
In a rare fit of agreement, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce both say they have a problem with the proposed rule.
The nation’s largest federation of labor unions says legal immigrant workers will suffer discrimination under the rule. The chamber fears employers will be sued for just that. Both are considering suing to stop the rule, while cautioning that they have not seen its final language.

From the Chamber of Commerce’s perspective (and the perspective of business owners) this is a bad rule:

Under the rule as proposed in June 2006, employers would be required to resolve “no-match letters” sent to them by the Social Security Administration, or could be considered to have knowingly hired an illegal immigrant. The letters indicate an employee’s name and Social Security number do not match SSA records. No-matches can indicate something as simple as a clerical error — a woman who had not updated her employment records after changing her name after marriage, for example — or that an illegal immigrant is using a false or stolen Social Security number to gain employment.

Basically, the federal government is trying to turn employers into defacto enforcers of federal law. Which is total bunk. If the federal government would secure the border already and take actual, legitimate steps to clear the illegal immigration population out of America employers wouldn’t have to worry so much about illegals showing up with faked SSN’s and other documents. Trying to foist detection and enforcement duties on American businesses is a total abdication of responsibility.
From the perspective of the unions, however, how funny is it that they’re trying to claim that the federal government has no authority to try and root illegal immigrants out of our workforce. Because that is something they absolutely have the authority to do. They just shouldn’t be using that authority to try and make employers do the enforcing when clearly that’s the job of federal law enforcement.