Lena Saradnik, a Tucson Demo-crat, represents District 26 in the Arizona House of Representatives.

General
Prestige Maintenance USA
Area Manager Technical
Yavapai College
Analyst Banner Programmer Health Care
Freedom Manor
Caregivers Retail
TOTAL WINE & MORE
WINE TEAM MEMBERS, CASHIER & STOCK MEMEBERS Dental
Apache Dental
Porcelain Techs General
GROUNDS CONTROL
LANDCAPE FOREMAN & LABORERS Education
Yavapai College
Teachers

Arizona is on the front line of the national immigration issue. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people come across our border. Many of them do not stay. Instead, they travel to jobs waiting for them in every state in this nation.

Illegal immigration is a serious problem we must address. The state Legislature must take action with meaningful, practical and real solutions to these problems, but those real solutions need to start at the federal level. I hope Congress will pass reform this year.

In Arizona, one of the areas we can address is the "demand" side of the equation. We can make it harder for Arizona employers to hire undocumented workers. In order to do that and subsequently hold employers accountable, we must have a quick method to verify the legal documents (Social Security cards, driver's licenses, etc.) presented to employers for work in the United States.

Until then, employers — including the Arizona House of Representatives, which recently experienced an immigration-related hiring incident — must simply wait for the Internal Revenue Service to notify them that the employee's documents do not match records on file with the federal government.

We also need to tone down the rhetoric surrounding this issue because several opportunistic hate groups have aligned themselves with the anti-immigrant movement. Two members of our Legislature, one Democrat and one Republican, have received numerous threats related to their positions on immigration.

The reason I did not support HB 2779 is that it has no verifiable method for employers to check the legal status of potential employees. HB 2779 has no enforcement provision and lacks a method to investigate complaints.

Because this bill does not require that valid complaints be forwarded to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for investigation, it is essentially a very expensive Maricopa County-dominated catch-and-release program.

The bill provides $2.5 million in funds. The bill says $1.5 million will go to Maricopa County, $500,000 to Pima County, and $500,000 will be divided among all the other counties.

Most likely, this legislation will be challenged in courts. In the meantime, the legislature is wasting valuable time and resources and burdening Arizona's businesses with a meaningless layer of bureaucracy.