Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Citing the immigration raids on Marshalltown’s Swift & Co. and Mississippi’s Howard Industries as evidence, Eric Bord, a partner in the Washington, D.C.-based Morgan Lewis law firm, said that the government-run E-Verify program has the “perverse effect of encouraging identity theft.”
“What [the raids] will do is focus employers on compliance in general, but E-Verify is an ineffective compliance tool because it doesn’t protect against identity theft,” Bord told reporter Mark Schoeff, Jr. of Workforce Management magazine.
Both Howard Industries and Swift & Co. used E-Verify, a government-run employment verification system, before the companies were targets of federal immigration raids.
The law that authorizes the E-Verify program is slated for expiration this fall. Although the U.S. House has approved a five-year extension of the program, the Senate has not yet considered reauthorization. The Department of Homeland Security, which has partnered with the Social Security Administration to manage E-Verify, is pushing for the now mostly voluntary program to become mandatory. The first step in that process is the approval of a regulation that would require all federal contractors to use the system.
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