Firings in Texas Fuel Talk of Crackdown on Illegal Migrants

Reports that the country's largest chicken-processing company has begun firing undocumented workers in East Texas have business leaders and immigration experts bracing for a nationwide crackdown on employers that hire illegal aliens.

Pilgrim's Pride, a Fortune 500 company that processes 44 million birds a week, confirmed Tuesday that it has recently terminated employees at its plants in Lufkin and Nacogdoches, but officials won't give numbers or reasons. Advocates for the workers estimate that the company has already fired more than 100 people who can't produce valid Social Security numbers.

"Large layoffs is what I'm hearing," said Linda Morales, a Stephen F. Austin State University professor in Nacogdoches who assists migrant families. "It wasn't Pilgrim's that decided to do this. I think it was some kind of warning they got ... about hiring people who don't have documentation."

Millions of workers nationwide could be affected if the beefed-up federal enforcement is carried out as some anticipate, said Tamar Jacoby, an immigration expert at the Manhattan Institute in Washington, a conservative think tank.

A major impetus for the crackdown is that the Department of Homeland Security is expected to finalize a regulation soon that puts more teeth in the employer-sanction law. That change could lead to fines of up to $10,000 per employee against companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The rule basically would change the definition of knowingly, and would put much more of the onus on employers to rectify discrepancies over Social Security numbers, experts say.

Read the full (Tarrant County, Texas) Star-Telegram story here.