Steve King: “In 1986, when the Amnesty Act was signed by Ronald Reagan, there was a requirement that each employer would have I-9…”

“In 1986, when the Amnesty Act was signed by Ronald Reagan, there was a requirement that each employer would have I-9 documents that would be filed. As soon as applicants came in, we took a copy of their information. We took the I-9 documents. We kept them in our files carefully. Any individual who came in and applied, we had the right file, expecting INS--Immigration and Naturalization Services, at that time--personnel to be at our door anytime, poking through all of our records, which records are probably still sitting in my archives somewhere. That was going to work. They believed it was going to work. What happened was, slowly along the way, the ACLU filed lawsuits, and people kind of ducked and dodged. They found a way to rationalize a way around it until they got around to: Well, as an employer, I can't be required to make a judgment call. If I am looking at a picture of someone, I can't be sure that that is the face of the person who is in front of me. They would make the presumption that was best for their business interests rather than best for the law enforcement part of it. Then, if ICE doesn't show up when the no-match letters come through, because they are not cooperating with the Social Security Administration to go through those records when it is very probable that when a Social Security number is being used maybe in 10 places, in 10 different towns, you can't get to 10 jobs simultaneously. It should make sense that nine or at least eight of those are phony.…”