President-elect Donald Trump has promised to launch mass deportations of unauthorized workers as soon as he takes office in January.
This has raised concerns for industries including construction that rely on foreign-born employees to deliver projects. The Pew Research Center estimates 26% of workers in construction are immigrants and 13% of people employed in construction are not authorized to work in the U.S.
But even for companies that employ only documented workers, questions abound, as those that are authorized to work in the U.S. may also face scrutiny, experts say.
“I think out of all my clients, I do feel like our construction clients are the most concerned,” said Shanon Stevenson, partner at Atlanta-based law firm Fisher & Phillips. “They do worry about losing large numbers of their workforce.”
Although details on how mass deportations may roll out remain murky — and cases could clog up immigration courts, Axios reported, bogging down what is already a slow process — construction leaders can take steps now to protect their firms and their authorized workers ahead of Jan. 20.
Internal checks
Stevenson said many firms have begun to conduct internal I-9 audits. The form confirms a person’s eligibility to work in the U.S. and must be completed within three days of an employee’s hiring.
For some contractors this information isn’t necessarily shared between all managers, so some company leaders or supervisors may not know their entire workforce’s status.
“I think a lot of times the companies may not even be aware of what their undocumented population is,” Stevenson said. “There’s maybe one or two people who are responsible for doing the I-9s and they’re usually like a lower-level HR person.”
To conduct an internal audit, the Society for Human Resource Management suggests employers:
- Gather all I-9 forms on file.
- Obtain an I-9 for employees who don’t currently have one.
- Audit existing I-9s for errors and correct them. Smaller errors may require corrections on the existing form, but substantive ones may require issuing a new form.
- Review any terminated employees’ I-9 forms to ensure those the employer is required to keep by law are correct.
I-9 forms are a method for ensuring eligibility to work, but they are not exhaustive. For example, employers don’t have to retain copies of the identification information used in an I-9, so if something like a Social Security card is falsified, the employer doesn’t retain a copy of the fraudulent document.
In addition to I-9s, 23 states now require some use of the federal government’s E-Verify program, according to credit agency Experian, though the exact nature of the rules varies. For example, some states only require E-Verify — a more exhaustive method of proving worker eligibility — for public employees or only for companies with a large number of full-time employees.
Other considerations
Marisa Diaz, immigrant worker justice program director for the New York City-based National Employment Law Project, has seen a significant increase in internal I-9 audits. But employers have to be careful, she said, as it can be detrimental to workers to check and re-check.
“It’s also extremely disruptive to workers, whether they’re work authorized or not,” Diaz told Construction Dive. “We see workers who do have work authorization, but are also sometimes fired as a result of audits given complications and re-verifying their information.”
At the same time, Diaz said, companies may need to consider avoiding reverification. Doing so simply because Trump is set to take office could be construed as discrimination against workers.
Diaz said she is aware of “increased fear across the board” for workers, whether they’re authorized to work or not. This is largely due to the anti-immigration rhetoric targeting those of Latin American and South American descent.
The impact of national attention on work status has broader impacts, even for day-to-day performance on the job, she said.
“That has detrimental effects on the workplace in terms of workers’ ability to identify hazards in the workplace, feeling safe to be able to speak up and let their employers know if there’s something that’s not only affecting them, but also all of their coworkers,” Diaz said.
