Gotcha!
I'm not a big fan of labor unions, but these days I'm nostalgic for the ancient champions of the anti-idiotarian left like George Meany as opposed to the current crop of Kool-Aid drinkers in the NEA or AFSCME. I'd heard that Meany's spirit was still alive in some of the craft unions and offer this from Fred O. Williams in the Buffalo News - Construction Police:

Union leaders fed up with contractors who employ illegal immigrants - thereby taking jobs from legitimate workers - have begun tracking down and turning in offenders.

Chris Stone is no immigration agent, but some days he acts like one.

One morning last week, he was tailing a group of Spanish-speaking men to a construction site in Cheektowaga. After getting into the left lane on Broadway to keep them in sight, he found himself alongside their car.

"They veered toward me," said Stone, a union organizer for Carpenters Local 9.

He called Cheektowaga police, who later arrested four men at the Sam's Club expansion site and turned them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Using tails, stakeouts and even video cameras, area construction unions have taken a vigilante role against illegal immigration. In the past few weeks, Stone and other union staff have led authorities to 13 illegal immigrant workers at two non-union construction sites.

Already facing a slow economy, construction unions say they are protecting area jobs. They accuse the federal government of lax enforcement and employers of looking the other way.
...
Non-union contractors have battled the building trades in the past, as they have gained a greater share of construction jobs. But on this issue, the non-union Associated Builders and Contractors says it is on the same page with its longtime foe. Builders who use illegal labor hurt legitimate businesses, both union and non-union, said Rebecca Meinking, president of the builders association's Empire State chapter.

Nor do legal experts criticize the union's gumshoe tactics. As long as it's done in public, where there's no expectation of privacy, people are free to watch and even videotape each other's activities, said Erie County District Attorney Frank J. Clark.

"In many cases, private citizens have more latitude investigating than law enforcement," he said.

It's a minor miracle they got the Feds to pick up the illegals. But they haven't caught very many so far. Maybe it's because Buffalo is so far North?

Buffalo native Alberto Benitez, an immigration law expert at George Washington University, says advocates of tighter immigration controls have an uphill battle. Where he lives now in suburban Virginia, it seems most of the low-paying jobs are performed by recent immigrants from Mexico or Central America - and no one's interested in whether they have a green card or not.

"Day care workers, short-order cooks, lawn care, apple picking - the U.S. economy would implode" without undocumented workers, he said.

In a less diverse, economically disadvantaged area like his hometown, though, Benitez acknowledged that the climate toward immigration is different.

"Buffalo is not a very diverse city," he said.

Apparently "diverse" means "tolerates illegal aliens" and "implode" means there would be no unemployment. That's really awful!

But let's see what the real wingnuts have to say:

"It sounds like they are deputizing themselves to denounce people, when it's not their function," said Sophie Feal, an immigration lawyer at the Volunteer Lawyers Project in Buffalo. "Just because someone looks foreign does not mean they're not eligible to work."

Sophie's just ticked that only illegals have been picked up so far. Sounds to me like they're just concerned citizens doing their duty to help round up illegal aliens. What are you doing, Sophie?

Which brings me to Fewer employers getting worker 'no match' letters:

The federal government is scaling back a program that sparked an outcry from industries that use immigrant labor.

No longer is the Social Security Administration sending out nearly 1 million letters a year to employers whose workers' Social Security numbers appear invalid.

This year the administration reduced the number of so-called "no-match" letters and added a caution that the letter alone is no reason to fire a worker.

Those who favor tighter border control say the move undermines enforcement of illegal immigration.

Those who advocate for immigrants hail the decision, saying it should reduce problems for foreign workers and confusion for employers.

"The program not only caused concern for the many immigrant employees - both documented and undocumented - but confused the employers who depend on immigrants to fill their jobs," said Shelley Schrader, director of the Interfaith Immigration Services of Nebraska.

The administration had said the expanded letter program was an effort to correct records so that billions of dollars of unaccounted Social Security earnings could be properly linked to workers for retirement benefits.

Let's see - the illegal aliens gum up Social Security records by using bogus numbers. The SSA sends out notices that the numbers are bogus and then all the whiners and profiteers get their knickers in a twist. And the proposed solution is not to send the letters.

This year the number of "no-match" letters was to be reduced to about 130,000, which is slightly above the 2001 level.

"We made a business decision to implement the new procedure," said Social Security spokeswoman Carolyn Cheezum. She could provide no statistics but said last year's expanded effort yielded a "substantially low number" of corrected records.

I wonder if it occurred to the Social Security rocket scientists that the numbers were uncorrectable?