Last Post 67 days, 16 hours Ago
New Missouri law targets illegal immigrants
By Chris Blank
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
01/01/2009
JEFFERSON CITY — Missouri businesses are about to get a shove toward a federal database for screening newly hired employees for illegal immigrants. And cities will risk getting punished if they become havens for illegal immigrants.
Some new laws taking effect today are part of a broad effort by Missouri lawmakers to crack down on illegal immigrants and those who employ them.
Starting in 2009, public employers — including state and local governments — must use the E-Verify database that searches records from the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to determine whether someone can work.
Private businesses won't have to use the database unless they have a government contract worth more than $5,000, receive state loans or tax breaks, or have been caught hiring an illegal immigrant.
But even those that don't have to use E-Verify will have a big incentive to start. Employers caught "knowingly" hiring an illegal immigrant risk losing business licenses, unless they had used E-Verify to screen their new hires.
Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who helped draft the law, said lawmakers showed foresight in going after illegal immigrants at cusp of the recession.
Federal statistics released in December show the state's unemployment rate hit 6.7 percent in November.
"It's going to have a very significant impact in protecting jobs for U.S. citizens and jobs for legal aliens during this time of high unemployment," said Kobach, who also was a top immigration adviser to former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. "The state Legislature's timing was perfect."
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"But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice – a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice – is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other." - John Stuart Mill
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