The following is the first in a series of excerpts from my latest book, Deconstructed: An Insider’s View of Illegal Immigration and the Building Trades, which will be published in September 2020.
©2020 Loren C. Steffy
On a Monday morning in 2009, the phone chirped on Stan Marek’s desk, and he snapped up the receiver. It was still early, and he wasn’t expecting any calls, let alone visitors. On the other end, the front-desk receptionist sounded nervous. Half a dozen men in dark windbreakers had filed into the lobby moments earlier and demanded to see the owner of the company. They looked like FBI agents, she said. The company Stan runs with his two cousins was founded by their fathers, and this family business has prided itself on following the rules for more than eighty years. He knew the men in the lobby weren’t from the FBI, but he also knew they were from the federal government, and he wouldn’t like what they were going to say.
Stan told the receptionist he would be right there. He sighed as he set the receiver down and glanced out the plate-glass window behind his desk. He had a corner office, but it didn’t offer much to look at. Other CEOs in Houston stared down from lofty skyscrapers, but his view was only one story off the ground and overlooked an area where his employees were loading drywall onto trucks to be sent to job sites. Beyond that were 
train tracks, then the Interstate 610 loop that encircles downtown Houston. The Marek offices were on land that his father and uncles bought in 1960. Stan oversaw a construction enterprise, known simply by his family name, Marek, that stretched across the Southwest and employed more than two thousand people. He was proud of the family company, which he and his cousins continued to build. He wondered if the men in the windbreakers waiting in his lobby could appreciate the sacrifices three generations of Mareks had made to get to this point.
Stan walked down the chrome-railed staircase, across the breezeway his construction crews used as a loading dock in the mornings when they arrived for their shifts and badged himself into the main building. He was five feet, eight inches tall, and although he was in his late sixties, he didn’t look like it. His hair was graying, but he walked quickly, like someone who still had a lot to get done. Across the expansive, two-story lobby, he could see the agents. On the back of their jackets, in big yellow letters, was one word: ICE— the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As Stan approached the agents, he knew this was the moment he and a great many other employers in Houston had been dreading.
ICE was formed as a division of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The assaults on U.S. soil reshaped a host of government programs and created several new federal agencies. ICE combined the old U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; Congress infused it with a unique combination of civil and criminal authority.
As Stan walked toward them, the ICE agents turned to face him. The administration of President Barack Obama, who took office in 2009, had promised a new “get tough” policy on illegal immigration. It focused less on rounding up undocumented workers and instead directed government enforcement efforts at the companies that employed them. Except for agriculture, no industry in Texas employed more undocumented workers than the construction business, and Marek was one of the biggest specialty subcontractors in town. It got its start hanging drywall and later expanded into carpentry, flooring and painting—basically any interior construction work that a developer required. Marek’s size may have put it on ICE’s radar for one of the agency’s first workplace audits in Houston, or it may have been Stan’s frequent calls to senators, representatives, and Obama administration officials stressing the need for immigration reform. “Everybody told me I was too big of a target,” Stan recalled.
Other employers who publicly called for immigration reform felt that ICE targeted them unfairly for audits, too, said Jacob Monty, a lawyer in Houston who works with companies on immigration issues. “Employers that speak out, they sometimes get retaliated against by ICE,” Monty said. “And the public often misunderstands and thinks ‘Oh, they just want cheap labor.’ I know Stan, and that’s not what he wants.”
Nevertheless, Stan, a lifelong Republican, now found himself targeted by a Democratic administration, and he couldn’t help but wonder as he approached the agents in his lobby if his vocal support for immigration reform was to blame for what he knew was about to happen. As he shook the lead agent’s hand, the man said: “Mr. Marek, we’re going to do an I-9 audit.” I-9s are officially known as Employment Eligibility Verification forms. Employers are supposed to complete one for each worker, verifying the person’s identity and eligibility to work in the United States. ICE wanted to audit Marek’s records to see if the company had any employees who were in the country illegally.
Stan felt a lump rise in his throat. Marek tried to confirm the citizenship of workers, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. By law, employees could provide as many as thirty-two different kinds of identification, and it was difficult to assess the accuracy of each. Besides, the most common form of ID, the Social Security card, is among the easiest to forge.
“How long do we have to get the information?” Stan asked.
“Seventy-two hours,” the agent replied.
“Well, do you mind if I get with my attorney?”
“Sure, but you’ve got seventy-two hours and then we want to see your I-9s,” the agent said.
“Well,” Stan stammered as the magnitude of the task sank in, “we’ve got a lot of people.”
“Well, you’ve got seventy-two hours,” the agent said again. He turned and headed for the door, and the other agents followed.
Stan returned to his office and called his attorney, Charles Foster. Foster had been practicing immigration law in Houston for some forty years. He grew up in McAllen, Texas, on the Mexican border, working side by side with immigrants, both legal and illegal. As a lawyer, he’d served as an adviser on immigration to presidents Obama and George W. Bush, as well as aiding Republican and Democratic candidates including Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Hillary Clinton.1 His firm, Foster LLP, is one of the largest immigration law firms in the country.
Foster convinced ICE to extend Marek’s deadline by a couple of weeks and the company complied. It was a big task: The agency wanted I-9s going back three years, which meant producing some three thousand documents. The agents also wanted to see the IDs each worker had presented at the time they were hired. The Social Security card or other identification had to appear authentic—Marek couldn’t be expected to detect a good forgery, but the card had to have the correct numbers in the proper configurations, and it had to look like a real Social Security card. If Marek had accepted any obvious forgeries, company executives could face fines or even jail time. Marek used an electronic government system known as E-Verify to confirm its employees’ immigration status. E-Verify, though, wasn’t fool-proof. If workers had what appeared to be a valid ID, it would pass the E-Verify check. Employers like Marek could follow all the rules and still wind up hiring undocumented workers.
The ICE agents returned with the results of their audit a few months later. All of the I-9s had been filled out correctly, which meant Marek wouldn’t face penalties. But ICE had found that about two hundred workers had improper documentation. Their identification didn’t match Social Security Administration records. The agency gave the employees ninety days clear up the discrepancies. If they didn’t, the agents told Stan, he would have to fire them.
Marek is a privately held company—the only shareholders are Stan and his cousins, Bruce and Paul Marek—and it’s the sort of business that values employee longevity. It routinely holds company rallies in the two-story lobby where it honors long-time employees for their service: Tenures of thirty to forty years are common. Stan knew each of the two hundred workers, and he met with them individually to tell them about the ICE audit. Some had been with him for decades. They owned homes and had raised families in Houston. Marek provided them with health benefits and 401(k) retirement plans, and it paid their payroll taxes. But most of the two hundred, it turned out, were in the U.S. illegally. Some simply admitted their immigration status when Stan confronted them, others made up reasons why they couldn’t go to the Social Security office. Still others said they would but didn’t. Ultimately, Stan had to let most of the two hundred go.
Stan Marek sees himself as a champion of the working man. In an era in which more and more Americans earn a living by sitting in front of a computer screen, he still believes that people who work with their hands and use tools to make things should be able to earn a middle-class income. He isn’t oblivious to the changing workplace, and he recognizes that the demographics of his industry have shifted—in fact, he watched it happen. He knows that progress means businesses and industries must change. Marek, in fact, prides itself on embracing cutting edge technology— it’s testing virtual reality googles on the job site and has its own drone. The company seeks to cultivate a dedicated and diverse workforce. From the time of its founding, Marek has relied on first- and second-generation immigrants from a wide range of countries.
But in some ways, Stan’s views on the workplace remain decidedly old-fashioned. He believes a good employer takes care of his employees, and the employees, in turn, take care of the company by doing good work. Stan’s father taught him that lesson when he handed Stan the reins of the business in the early 1980s. Back then, the traditional employment model in construction started with the general contractor, who would oversee a building project. The general contractor hired subcontractors, like Marek, who had a workforce of employees who received hourly pay, overtime, benefits, workers’ compensation insurance, and job training. The subcontractor paid payroll taxes and provided I-9s on all its workers.
In the past three decades, however, the model has changed. Fewer subcontractors have their own workers. Instead, they hire laborers they treat as independent contractors and pay them for piecework. In the drywall business, for example, these independent workers are paid by foot of wallboard hung, not by the hour. They receive no overtime, benefits, workers’ compensation insurance, or employer-funded training. That leaves many workers earning poverty-level wages and no overtime pay for longer hours. The workers pay no taxes, have no insurance if they’re injured on the job, and essentially have no career path. They will never be promoted to a supervisor position because those jobs are held by the subcontractor who hired them. For many illegal immigrant workers, this is the only employment option. The arrangement has created a system that hurts the workers, leads to more accidents, mistakes and shoddy workmanship, and ultimately undermines the industry’s future.
Stan has seen more of Marek’s competitors choose this path. Many subcontractors’ offices are staffed by a few white-collar employees who manage a virtual workforce of low-paid, often unskilled and ever-shifting laborers. Many of these workers are in the country illegally.
Stan thought about the irony of the situation. Marek believed in paying its employees well, providing workers’ compensation insurance in case they were injured, and offering the training they needed to do a quality job while making their job sites safer. Marek’s workers all had income taxes withheld from their checks, and they all paid into Social Security. Even if they had stayed on his payroll, the two hundred workers he had to let go would never receive the benefits of their Social Security contribution because the Social Security numbers they submitted to Marek were invalid. In a strange way, they were actually strengthening the perpetually under-funded Social Security entitlement program for millions of other retirees by paying in but not taking out.
Stan felt badly for the workers he dismissed. What would happen to them? Would they be deported, forced to return to a country many of them hadn’t seen in decades? How would they provide for their families? After all, some had children who were U.S. citizens. By firing them, had he set in motion events that would tear families apart?
Even though Stan had to let them go, many of the workers remained loyal to him and stayed in touch. None of them was deported. Instead, over the next few weeks, or in some cases, the next few days, they found other jobs. After all, these were skilled laborers who had been trained by Marek, which had a reputation for quality. They knew how to do the job right. The companies that hired them, though, did things differently. In most cases, the new employers paid five dollars an hour less than Marek paid. Their workers received no health or retirement benefits. No taxes were drawn from their paychecks because in most cases the workers were paid in cash or as independents who were responsible for their own taxes—they received a 1099 Form from the Internal Revenue Service for their wages, rather than a W-2, if there were any record of their pay at all. There was no accident insurance or paid overtime, and the local emergency room was their health care provider.
The turn of events enraged Stan. On a purely business level, the employees he’d nurtured and trained were now competing against him at a lower cost. At the same time, these workers were more likely to become a greater burden on society than when they had worked for him. And the companies who hired them were rewarded for perpetuating a shadow economy created by decades of misguided immigration policy. Stan had witnessed the slow erosion of his part of the construction industry from one that offered careers to one that offered essentially day labor. He knew the industry couldn’t continue on this path without paying a price in lost quality and compromised safety. He wanted something better for workers and for his industry, and he was determined to change immigration policy.
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