Activists Win Court Battle on Measure to Restrain Hiring of Illegal Aliens

Immigration-control advocates seeking to restrain the hiring of illegal alien workers in Oregon have won a challenge in the state’s highest court.

A challenge was filed last year to ballot language certified by the Oregon attorney general.

The ballot measure, Initiative Petition 52 (2016) (IP 52), will be submitted to Oregon voters soon. If passed, IP 52 would require businesses with five or more employees to confirm that their employees are actually legally eligible to work. The measure was the work-product of Oregonians for Immigration Reform (OFIR).

The issue of illegal aliens working in local communities is not a small one for the Beaver State. Recent figures show that around five percent of the state’s workforce is illegal. Unemployment figures for black youth, for example, is as high as 55 percent.

In the ruling by the Oregon Supreme Court (attached below), Justice Rives Kistler writing for the court en banc notes that “Federal immigration law makes it unlawful for ‘a person or other entity *** to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien.’”

The Court agreed with OFIR’s President Cynthia Kendoll that the state’s attorney general’s certified ballot language would be both defective and misleading to Oregon voters.

The attorney general, the opinion noted, wrote and certified the ballot language in a way that put too much emphasis on the new conditions proposed for obtaining and maintaining business licenses. Moreover, the Oregon attorney general was found to have failed to communicate the actual effect of the proposed law, i.e., that a potential employee’s eligibility documents will have to be confirmed by E-Verify, a federal website which verifies important information like one’s social security number.

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