Homeland Security v. SHRM?
If you still have any doubts that this is a crazy political year, consider the fact that the Bush administration is taking on one of it's core constituencies: business.
The Department of Homeland Security is certainly one of the most Republican departments in the federal government (remember that it didn't even exist before the Bush administration) and Republican's are generally viewed as the more business-friendly (read employer-friendly) party.
The Society for Resource Management, which has at least 71 pages discussing union avoidance on its website, is officially non-partisan but represents businesses with employees, typically seen as Republican territory. (For the record, I've been a SHRM member for years.)
However, insert the immigration issue and everything gets muddled.
The Department of Homeland Security is challenging the Society for Human Resource Management-supported Congressional bill named the New Employee Verification Act (NEVA) (H.R. 5515). SHRM supports NEVA as an alternative to DHS' E-Verify system.
Today, there is an interesting posting on the Department of Homeland Security's Leadership Journal blog in which DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker basically questions SHRM's integrity:
SHRM lobbies for the HR execs who do corporate hiring. It also opposes E-Verify. I suppose corporate hiring is easier if you can hire illegal workers, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that SHRM wants to kill a program that makes it harder to hire illegal workers.
But SHRM has taken Washington arts to a new level. SHRM says it doesn’t want to kill E-Verify. SHRM says it wants to replace E-Verify with a new, better program to prevent illegal hiring. A closer look shows that the SHRM alternative is doomed to fail – and will take years to do so. So for a decade, while the SHRM alternative is failing, no one will have a good tool to actually prevent illegal hires. Which may be precisely what SHRM wants.
Interesting how the immigration debate upsets the traditional political alliances in Washington. We live in interesting times.
By the way, employers who are interesting in making sure that their new hires are legal to work in the US should check out Imperative's E-Verify enhancement.
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