How serious was Bersin immigration violation?

How serious was Bersin immigration violation?    U.S. Customs and Border Commissioner Alan Bersin's failure to fill out I-9 forms for household employees is a relatively minor technical violation, but one that someone closely involved in enforcing immigration laws should not make, according to immigration policy experts.
   President Obama appointed Bersin to the CBP leadership post while Congress was on Easter break at the end of March, after his confirmation had languished in the Senate Finance Committee for six months. The recess appointment angered Sen. Charles Grassley, the committee's ranking member, who revealed in a news release that discrepancies related to documentation for household workers were at the center of the delayed confirmation process.

Grassley

   As first reported by AmericanShipper.com, Bersin's problem was that he did not fill out the I-9 form from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for several workers at his home in San Diego.
   'Anyone who aspires to a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet position ought to be paying attention to stuff like that,' said Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Bersin

   As CBP commissioner, Bersin is in charge of overseeing inspections and admission of foreign nationals at ports of entry and commands the Border Patrol, whose mission is to stop people from sneaking across the border between checkpoints. Bersin also has extensive experience dealing with Mexican border issues and enforcing immigration laws. In April 2009, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed him assistant secretary for international affairs and special representative for border affairs. His primary duty was coordinating law enforcement responses to the drug war in Mexico and leading the president's Southwest Border Initiative for dealing with security, immigration, narcotics and trade.

Napolitano

   Bersin, a former U.S. attorney, held a similar post as the Justice Department's southwest border czar during the Clinton administration. From 1995 to 1998, he advised the department on immigration law enforcement along the border and supervised anti-drug and human trafficking programs.
   Bersin early on became a candidate within the Obama administration to lead CBP. Department observers considered the DHS posting as a temporary placeholder to get him involved in border policy until his confirmation appeared smooth. Obama finally nominated Bersin last September.
   The purpose of the I-9 is to force employers to verify that workers have proper identification, such as a drivers' license or residence card, which appears genuine and establishes they are legally in the country, and eligible for employment. The exception to the rule is if individuals are hired for casual domestic work on a sporadic, irregular or intermittent basis or as independent contractors. The documents must be retained for all employees for three years from their date of hire, or one year after termination, along with copies of the documents presented. An employer who fails to properly complete or retain the I-9 may face civil penalties of $110 to $1,100 for each violation. The amount depends on the size of the business, seriousness of the violation, whether or not the individual was an unauthorized alien and whether the employer acted in good faith.
   Citizenship and Immigration Services is a sister agency to CBP within the Department of Homeland Security.
   The difference between the I-9 and other types of forms, such as the Internal Revenue Service's W-2 form that's included with tax returns, is that the I-9 does not have to be submitted to the government. Rather, it simply must be retained in case the employer is audited by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (yet another DHS component) or some other federal agency. Investigations can be random, the result of a tip or part of targeted reviews of certain industry sectors, such as those with a history of hiring illegal aliens or ones involved in supporting national security work or critical infrastructure. A paperwork violation, however, could escalate into something more serious if it is determined that someone knowingly hired an undocumented worker.
   'Mr. Bersin and his wife verified the legal eligibility to work in the United States for each of their household employees prior to hiring. They did this by examining and recording information from passports, Social Security cards, and other identifying documents,' DHS spokesman Matt Chandler said in a statement to AmericanShipper.com.
   'Mr. Bersin has never hired someone who was ineligible to work in the United States. Mr. Bersin has paid all applicable employment taxes for each person hired to work in his household, whether or not that person was technically an employee or an independent contractor. Despite verifying work eligibility and paying taxes, Mr. Bersin did not fill out I-9 forms for these individuals (although an employment agency did for one), because he did not know they were required for people working in his household. He has expressed to the Senate that he regrets this error.'
   The spokesman declined to provide details on how many workers Bersin had hired or their job descriptions.
   'For him to claim that he was unaware, that's hard to believe,' especially in the wake of high-profile immigration mistakes by Zoe Baird and others, Vaughn said when informed by a reporter about the situation.
   Baird was President Bill Clinton's nominee for attorney general in 1993 who withdraw her name after it became known that she never paid payroll taxes for two illegal aliens who worked for her as a chauffeur and nanny. She ultimately paid a $2,900 fine for the infractions.
   'If it's true, that's troubling that someone in law enforcement didn't take seriously' the need to complete the I-9 form, Vaughn said. Bersin, she said, may have felt confident that the persons he hired were authorized to work in the United States and didn't need the form to make that determination.
   'It does show how much education still needs to be done about the problem of illegal employment,' she added.
   The goal of the I-9 form is to ensure employers hire people who are legally in the country. 'If he complied, then filling out these forms is important, but not nearly as important as complying with the law,' said Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council.
   He noted the I-9 is not very helpful in actually determining whether a prospective employee has legal status and that DHS's E-Verify system is too full of bugs to be reliable.
   E-Verify is a voluntary Internet-based system that allows an employer, using information provided on the I-9, to determine employment eligibility for new hires. The database continues to be plagued by false positives for people who are allowed to obtain jobs, Johnson said. Another problem is that data about changes to someone's status is not updated quickly.
   Disclosure of Bersin's slip up comes less than two weeks after Lorraine Henderson, a former CBP port director in the Boston area, was found guilty of deliberately encouraging her Brazilian housekeeper to illegally stay in the country. She could face up to five years in jail. During her trial, she testified that she did not question the housekeeper about her immigration status despite a colleague's warnings that the immigrant was in the country illegally, according to the Boston Globe.
   Henderson, who was suspended from her job without pay after her arrest 15 months ago, said she did not know that her housekeeper had paid $10,000 to be smuggled into the country when she hired her in 2004. She claimed she didn't know CBP officials had the authority to ask someone whether he or she has legal status.
   There has been no public complaint from lawmakers about Bersin's admitted oversight other than a procedural one from Grassley about Obama bypassing the Senate confirmation process to install Bersin and others. However, in a similar vein, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio, have said they are troubled by the appointment of Rafael Borras as under secretary of management within DHS in part because 'numerous tax errors on his federal income tax filings show a troubling lack of attention to detail and a pattern of carelessness.' ' Eric Kulisch