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Immigration News

December 24th, 2006 Posted by Mark

Immigration is still such a big issue for every employer across the country. On the federal level, Congress will return this coming January, and it looks like the Democrats may push through some sort of working visa program to allow illegals to stay here in the States to work. There of course is other talk to deport all illegals and make immigration standards in the United States much more stringent.

On state levels, there is talk about making it so employers get fined severely for having illegal immigrants on their work forces. That could lead to more raids than already happen by government immigration services in search of illegal immigrants in your work place.

But one of the things that employers also have to worry about is the fact that immigrants, even illegal immigrants, have rights when working for you, protected under state and federal labor laws. Many employers, I reckon, already know this and are OK with it, but here is a case when the employer did not follow the labor laws on immigrant rights.

An immigrant working for Sara Lee Bakery named Maria Zarco had been a 10 year employee of the company and a member of the Union, but she was discharged from her position at the job when the employer found out that that whole time she had been falsifying her work records. She had on her work records that she was from Guatemala, when she was really from Mexico.

The issue, though, according to news reports, was not really that the employee had been discharged because she falsified her work records. That was within the employer’s legal rights to do so, according to the National Labor Relations Board. The real issue was whether the employer fired the employee really because she had been working closely with the Union, had actually been a Union organizer, and they were looking for a reason all along to get rid of her, and the immigration issue was just a pretext. Stay tuned on this one.