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**Remarks of Assistant Secretary Julie L. Myers**

**(as prepared for delivery)**

**at the**

**Shughart, Thomson & Kilroy Labor and Benefit Symposium**

**Overland Park, Kansas**

**Tuesday, May 20, 2008**

Thank you, Kathryn *(Anastasio, Marketing Director, STK).* I am
delighted to be with you this afternoon.

I want to thank Terry Kilroy of Shugart Thomson and Kilroy for inviting
me here today. I also want to thank him and his firm for offering this
symposium.

I also want to applaud everyone who's made time in their busy schedules
to attend. The companies and organizations that you lead and serve will
benefit from the time you're spending here today, especially from the
mini-sessions that are being presented.

It's no secret to anyone in business in American today, no matter how
large or how small, that employers have to follow a wide variety of
often-complex laws, ranging from affirmative action to immigration
compliance. You are here today because your company depends on you to
make sure it follows those laws. I am here today to tell you, your
country depends on you, too.

Let me share with you what I mean, from my perspective as the head of U.
S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Department of Homeland
Security.

Before I do, though, I'd like to tell you just a little bit about ICE.

It's still not as widely known as it should be, but ICE is the federal
government's second largest investigative agency. Only the FBI is
larger. Our mission is both broad and deep.

ICE's 16,500 employees target everything from document fraud and illegal
arms trafficking to financial crimes, protecting intellectual property
rights, and prosecuting child sexual predators. And we are working to
promote increased levels of compliance by employers with the nation's
immigration and customs laws.

Promoting compliance with those laws by responsible employers -- and by
enforcing the law on those who break them -- is among ICE's most
important missions. And it's one we can't do alone.

Each of you can play an indispensable role in ICE's efforts to identify
and target those individuals and businesses that engage in identity
theft, benefit fraud, and human trafficking by knowingly hiring illegal
alien workers in violation of law.

So my goal today is to thank you for your interest and to enlist you as
partners in the federal government's effort to put an end to the very
real economic and human toll the hiring of illegal aliens is taking on
our country.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have developed a number of
very useful and important tools for businesses to use in helping promote
compliance with our immigration laws. I'd like to highlight two of them.

The first is called E-Verify. E-Verify is a web-based program that
allows employers to verify the information they collect on an I-9 form,
the form used to document that an employee is eligible to work in the
United States.

Through E-Verify, employers can electronically compare the information
on an I-9 against more than 425 million records in the Social Security
Administration's database and more than 60 million records in the
Department of Homeland Security's immigration databases.

E-Verify provides employers with data that takes much of the guesswork
out of determining employment eligibility. Employers using E-Verify
report that they are more willing to hire work authorized non-citizens
than before they joined E-Verify because the system increases their
confidence in their ability to distinguish work authorized non-citizens
from those who are not.

We want to make sure this tool works for you. To that end, DHS is
constantly working to increase the universe of information available
through E-Verify and to improve its accuracy rate.

Last fall, E-Verify expanded to include a new photo-screening tool to
help employers compare the identity information on an employee's
Employee Authorization Document or green card against the image for that
card that is contained in DHS databases. With just one look, this will
help employers tell whether the person pictured on the document they
have in front of them is really the person who lawfully acquired that
document.

DHS is working to add additional photos to the photo tool, including
visa photos and U.S. citizen passport photos. We also are in discussions
with several states that are considering adding their state drivers
license photos to the photo tool.

With respect to E-Verify's accuracy rate, more than 99 times out of a
hundred, someone who is legally authorized to work, and who has already
taken steps to correct any errors if they existed, is correctly
verified. And most of the mismatches are either people who were aware
there was inaccurate data and have done nothing to fix it or people who
are, in fact, not legally authorized to work in the United States.

Because this program is working - to date, more than
[65,000]{.underline} employers representing over 250,000 worksites are
enrolled in E-Verify. About [1,000]{.underline} more are joining the
program every week. E-Verify is free and fast -- 94 percent of all
queries generated are returned, "work authorized," within three to five
seconds. By anybody's standards, that's quick turnaround.

ICE wants to work as partners with America's business community and to
create a culture of compliance within the corporate community. That's
why we also conduct training for employers all around the country. The
success of those training efforts, and the growing demand for such
training, led to the creation of our IMAGE program. Because in
government we love acronyms, IMAGE stands for the ICE Mutual Agreement
between Government and Employers.

IMAGE is designed to help employers strengthen their hiring practices to
build a legal workforce. ICE provides participants in the IMAGE program
with extensive education and training on such useful skills as proper
hiring practices, detecting fraudulent documents, and properly
completing the I-9 form.

We launched IMAGE in January 2007 with nine charter members, ranging
from General Dynamics to National Association of Foreign Trade Zones.
One of the charter members, the Atlas Pallet Company in Boise, Idaho,
joined, according to the owner, Gary Crane, because they "needed to be
part of a solution rather than a problem. I don't have to look over my
shoulder and worry whether our people are documented, because we know
that they are."

You can find out more about IMAGE at our web site at
[www.ice.gov](http://www.ice.gov/). Just click the heading "Partners,"
and then click on IMAGE program. You will find a great deal of useful
information, including a listing of industry best practices with respect
to sound hiring processes.

While you're at our web site, I would also suggest you look at our
brochure, "Know Your Workforce." It's a four-page, easy to use guide
that provides case studies, red flag indicators, and best practices that
I believe you'll find very useful. It can be found on our web site, by
clicking on the Worksite Enforcement Program link on our home page.

We are already finding that our IMAGE partners and others are finding
the help we're providing on best practices particularly valuable. And,
we are working to provide a variation of the IMAGE program so we can
include even more partners.

We have also been reaching out to business to provide information about
how to handle a No-Match letters. As you know, for many years, Social
Security has informed employers when the name and Social Security number
they provided for an employee did not match Social Security's records.

Receiving a No-Match letter for an employee could mean something as
simple as the employee recently was married or divorced and changed his
or her last name.

However, a No-Match letter could also be an indicator that there may be
a problem with that employee's work authorization. Yet, far too many
employers were uncertain as to appropriate follow up on these letters;
some even just threw them away.

In response to numerous requests from businesses that approached ICE
asking for specific guidance about how they should respond to No-Match
letters the Department of Homeland Security issued a proposed No-Match
Rule last fall. This guidance lets employers know what steps to take
within 90 days of receiving a no-match notification.

I should point out that the proposed rule [does not impose new
obligations]{.underline} on employers; it simply outlines the steps they
can take. But it's also worth noting that under the rule, employers that
act in good faith and follow those steps within the 90-day time frame
will have a safe harbor from the no-match letter being used against them
in an enforcement action. The rule is currently in litigation, of
course, but we are hopeful we will be able to resolve the litigation
soon.

As I hope these examples show, our preference, of course, is always is
to find ways to work with employers, encourage them to meet their legal
responsibility and to provide incentives to comply with the law. But
there are always those who either knowingly break the law or recklessly
disregard the law. In those cases, we fully and aggressively enforce the
law.

We want to ensure that [honest American businesses]{.underline} are
competing on a level playing field, instead of being undercut by
unscrupulous criminals who use illegal workers to cut costs and gain a
competitive advantage.

An especially insidious of these criminal enterprises is what we call
domestic off-shoring. We are all familiar with the concern many raise
about the sending American jobs to workers in foreign lands who work
cheaper than American workers. This is one of the consequences of
today's global economy, and it has its pluses and its minuses.

In a variation of that practice, we are finding companies essentially
off-shoring American jobs to illegal workers right here in the United
States. Using illegal aliens as part of a domestic off-shoring scheme is
without any positive benefit to American workers or businesses.

Companies that build their workforce using illegal workers here in the
United States take jobs away from legal workers, unfairly gain market
share over legitimate businesses, often disregard worker safety and
environmental laws, and shift the tax burden onto those who follow the
law.

One of the clearest examples of this practice is a criminal
investigation conducted in Michigan. Last month, three Florida residents
were sentenced to jail in a Grand Rapids courtroom for operating a
nationwide janitorial service known as Rosenbaum-Cunningham
International (or RCI) that was staffed almost exclusively with illegal
aliens.

This operation is a classic example of what I mean by domestic
off-shoring. RCI provided cleaning and grounds-maintenance services to
theme-restaurant chains across the country, including such well-known
customers as Dave and Buster's, Hard Rock Café, and House of Blues. This
company had essentially off-shored its workforce to illegal aliens here
in the United States.

Over the four-year period from 2001 and 2005, RCI's revenues exceeded
\$54 million. During that same period, RCI failed to collect and pay
nearly \$16 in employment taxes, laundering the funds they should have
been sending to the federal government to shell accounts used to fund
such personal indulgences as the purchase of race horses and fancy homes
in California and Florida.

The three former officers who were convicted are now serving sentences
ranging from two-and-a-half years to ten years. They have been ordered
to pay nearly \$50 million in fines and restitution. And I think they
were more than a little surprised that their scheme unraveled in such a
dramatic fashion.

Early in the investigation, one of the principals told an ICE undercover
agent that if things got too hot, he would just flee to Mexico. Well,
that "Plan B" didn't work out too well, and instead of cooling himself
on a Mexican beach, he's cooling his heels in federal prison.

Unfortunately, the extent to which people will go to break the law and
try to avoid being caught is limitless. These criminal enterprises are
always finding new, more sophisticated ways to hide their business model
of hiring illegal aliens. These efforts often result in other crimes
such as human trafficking, tax evasion, money laundering,
counterfeiting, smuggling, and identify theft.

The sophistication of these operations led to the creation of what we
call, "Operation Paycheck." We called it Operation Paycheck because it
targets the methods used by unscrupulous employers to pay their illegal
aliens without raising any red flags. Frequently, they use complicit
money service businesses and even shell corporations to pay their
illegal employees and evade various reporting requirements.

One of our most successful Operation Paycheck activities was our
investigation of a business called "Pronto Cash," operating out of
Orlando, Florida. We uncovered an extensive conspiracy involving
construction companies, various shell companies, contract fraud, phony
workers compensation, and a money service business.

All of this criminal activity took place to hide the hiring of illegal
aliens. In the end, more than \$3.8 million was seized, along with
property such as computers, and the owner of Pronto Cash pled guilty to
a federal money laundering crime.

Since launching Operation Paycheck in 2006, we have seized more than
[\$10]{.underline} million worth of cash, monetary instruments, and
assorted property. These cases have returned [59]{.underline}
indictments and resulted in [30]{.underline} convictions, with cases
still pending. And this is just part of our overall enforcement effort.

So far during just the current fiscal year, in worksite enforcement
operations alone ICE has made 542 criminal arrests, including 74
business owners, corporate officials, supervisors, human resources
managers or other managers, and 468 employees.

Let me be clear, these are criminal arrests, not the administrative
arrests which describe the beginning of removal proceedings. These
arrests charge individuals with federal crimes related to illegal hiring
and employment, and if convicted, they will face huge fines and
potential jail times.

Among those recently arrested on criminal charges were nearly 100
employees at five poultry processing plants in Texas, Florida,
Tennessee, Arkansas, and West Virginia.

At these plants, we found aliens impersonating real U.S. citizens, and
so we charged them with false use of a Social Security numbers and
document fraud -- crimes they committed in order to get their jobs.

We've spoken with a number of these people whose identify was stolen by
the illegal aliens we arrested at these plants. They have described a
wide array of hardships they've suffered as a result, including mistaken
tax liens, denial of medical benefits, and damaged credit ratings. It
will take these innocent victims months if not years to straighten
everything out.

In a similar case, just last week we conducted an operation at a meat
processing plant in Iowa, where we arrested nearly 400 illegal alien
workers and have charged more than 300 of them with crimes, including
aggravated identity theft and fraudulent use of a Social Security
number.

If this scenario sounds familiar, you're probably recalling a worksite
enforcement action we took last year at George's Processing, Inc., a
poultry processing plant in Butterfield, Missouri. We arrested more than
130 workers, 28 of them on criminal charges.

Early this year, two of George's human resources employees were
convicted on criminal charges that include harboring illegal aliens and
helping undocumented workers obtain fraudulent documents. Jail sentences
of up to ten years are possible. Other cases are still pending.

Of course, any time a criminal conspiracy exists to recruit and use
undocumented aliens for purposes of finding cheap labor, the likelihood
of exploitation is enormous. People who find themselves in those
positions are unlikely to report their employers if they aren't paid
minimum wage or overtime or if they're working in unsafe conditions.

Such schemes are not only illegal and unfair to law-abiding employers
and workers; they are also criminally unfair to the undocumented workers
who are being taken advantage of. So when ICE goes after these employers
our goal is not to shatter the hopes of people coming to America in
search of a better life. We are trying those people them from predatory
criminals who are turning the search for the American dream into a
living nightmare.

That's why, in contrast to how worksite enforcement was handled before
the creation of ICE, we don't just identify and begin administrative
proceedings against the undocumented workers, we also file criminal
charges against the owners of those businesses who exploit those workers
and use the sweat from their brows to illegally enrich themselves.

The Kawasaki Sushi case is a perfect example of this new approach.
Kawasaki is Baltimore's best-known sushi restaurants. They even had a
location at the world-renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The owners were exploiting cheap, illegal area to maximize their
profits, making them work more than 40 hours a week, underpaying them,
and failing to forward payroll taxes to the government. They were then
using those ill-gotten gains to purchase such items as luxury vehicles,
real estate and various extravagant purchases.

The owners pled guilty to several serious federal charges, agreed to
forfeit nearly one million dollars in cash and property, and are looking
at serious jail time.

These cases are just a few of ICE's most recent operations. But we've
been targeting criminal behavior and going after employers who knowingly
hire illegal aliens for several years. Let me share with you just one
more example.

In April 2006 we conducted a worksite enforcement operation at 45
different facilities of the Pallet Management Division of IFCO Systems
North America, including here in Texas.

We launched the investigation into IFCO Systems based on a tip from an
IFCO employee in its Albany, New York plant. According to curt
documents, this worker had witnessed a number of his co-workers ripping
up their W-2 forms as soon as they were given them.

When he asked a manager what was going on, he was told that since those
employees were illegal aliens, and didn't intend to file tax returns,
the W-2s were meaningless. Outraged, this employee called ICE -- and
that was the beginning of the end for this illegal scheme.

According to an affidavit filed in this case, the Social Security
Administration noted that in 2004 and in 2005, at least 13 written
notifications were sent to IFCO headquarters in Houston, TX. Despite
being informed of [thousands]{.underline} of mismatches, less than 1%
were corrected.

As a result of our investigation and the subsequent worksite operation,
we arrested nearly 1,200 illegal aliens who were on IFCO's payroll,
including a majority of the facilities' foremen and manual laborers. The
indictment charges that, in fact, "nearly all of the pallet workers and
foremen ICE encountered at the new IFCO plants were illegal aliens."

Since the beginning of 2007, a total of 12 officers and managers of this
company have been charged criminally. Seven have already pled guilty to
charges related to the employment of illegal aliens. Five were charged
earlier this year, including two executives, on charges related to the
conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal alien laborers at IFCO
plants. These five defendants are currently awaiting trial, and, of
course, innocent until proven guilty.

I am convinced that drying up the job market for illegal workers would
be the single most effective thing we could do to push back the tide of
illegal aliens coming into the country. By encouraging voluntary
compliance through outreach and by requiring it through enforcement
efforts, we can begin to reduce the power of the "jobs magnet" that
attracts illegal workers to the United States.

It's a fundamental matter of employment supply and demand; the vast
majority of those who enter the United States illegally do so in the
hopes of finding work. If the jobs aren't there, the reason for coming
isn't there. That's where business leaders can stand up, do the right
thing, and make an enormous difference.

I have no doubt that the companies you represent are committed to
obeying the law. And I recognize that you and your employees deal with a
complex array of federal, state, and local laws. Our goal is to give
your organizations the tools to make it easier to comply with the
nation's immigration laws -- laws that have long been on the books but
that are now being aggressively enforced.

That's why I hope you will enlist as our partners in our shared goal of
decreasing the hiring of undocumented workers by doing all you can to
comply with the law, for the good of your companies and of our country.

Thank you.