Advocacy Update
May 2008

LIRS Opposes the SAVE Act and Other Punitive Immigration Bills
By Eric B. Sigmon, LIRS Policy Advocate

In April LIRS and bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) sent letters to Congress opposing the Secure America through Verification and Enforcement Act (SAVE Act, H.R. 4088). The SAVE Act is one of the many deportation-oriented bills that members of Congress have introduced during the current legislative session. In the letters, LIRS and the bishops called upon Congress to reject poorly conceived policies that will hurt our economy and communities rather than provide security and stability. “[I]mmigration problems are simply too complex to be solved with a detain and deport approach,” wrote Bishop Julian Gordy of the Southeastern Synod.

The central component of the SAVE Act, introduced in late 2007 by Reps. Heath Shuler (D-NC11) and Brian Bilbray (R-CA50), mandates that all employers verify the work authorization of their employees using a national database fraught with errors. The bill would also expand detention space by 8,000 beds and oblige local police officers to enforce federal immigration law.

In their letter to Congress, ELCA bishops from Ohio stated that “[t]he legislation would impose huge costs and burdens on businesses” by requiring all employers to use a flawed Social Security Administration database to verify that every single worker is authorized to work in the country. The database has nearly 18 million errors, including errors on 12.7 million U.S. citizen workers whose jobs would be in jeopardy if SAVE is implemented. Correcting an error takes weeks, even months, during which a worker would be at risk of layoff or termination.

The SAVE Act would also require that local police officers act as immigration agents, a policy that has already deterred people from reporting crimes and has shifted important local resources away from solving crimes. In some communities immigrants have even been targeted for crime on the assumption that they will be too afraid to report. Bishop Floyd Schoenhals of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Synod wrote, “Such racist and divisive behavior is not what our federal laws or our leaders in Congress should be promoting.”

Not to be outdone by their restrictionist colleagues in the House, in March several senators led by David Vitter (R-LA) proposed a package of bills with the same detain and deport approach. Among them are bills that would require that the government complete 700 miles of border fencing, deploy 6,000 National Guard troops to police the border, create mandatory minimum jail sentences for immigrants crossing the border, and make English the national language. LIRS and other immigration advocates were able to defeat several of these measures, but we anticipate that they will be reintroduced in the future.

For more information or to take action against the SAVE Act, contact Eric Sigmon at lirsdc@lirs.org.

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