Santa Ana Is Site for 2 INS Employment Pilot Programs

As long as immigration agents have been raiding businesses and weeding out illegal workers, employers have complained that such actions--while perhaps justified--leave them in a bind.

Once agents issue their list of unauthorized workers, employers have little choice but to dismiss the employees quickly, which often depletes the work force and hampers operations until new employees can be hired.

Now, federal and state agencies think they’ve found one way to help employers in such a predicament.

Under a memorandum of understanding signed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and two California agencies--the Employment Development and Social Services departments--certain employers will be able to use the state jobs bank and referral service to find replacement workers who have been prescreened and are ready for immediate employment.

This pilot project is being tested in Santa Ana and city of Industry, cities where 230 businesses are participating in another INS test that allows employers to verify the work status of new hires through the INS’s database.

The job placement and referral services also will be available to scores of other Santa Ana and Industry employers that lose workers as a result of INS inspections.

The pilot program has been in effect for only a week, so there’s no data yet on how many workers have been hired through this system. But immigration officials believe the job placement program dovetails nicely with their work site verification test, which the INS says already has uncovered almost 3,000 unauthorized workers.

The job placement project is noteworthy for one other reason: It marks an unexpected joining of forces between uneasy bedfellows in federal and California agencies.

Each side is aligned with different political parties, and both are still stinging from the way they worked together in investigating the El Monte sweatshop case last summer.

Don Lee covers workplace issues for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7407 and at don.lee@latimes.com