CAIR - Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform

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Littwin: Firing illegal immigrants no joyful task

Lee Driscoll is cracking down on illegal immigrants in his restaurants.

And it's breaking his heart....

He's going to fire as many as 51 of his employees - for crimes that include trying to make a living for their families....

"I think it will make me very emotional," he is saying on the day the story breaks. "I think it will make me cry."

Lee Driscoll is CEO of Wynkoop Holdings Inc., which runs the restaurants partly owned by John Hickenlooper....

But the restaurants, it turns out, have everything to do with Hickenlooper....

Raul Garcia-Gomez was a dishwasher at the Cherry Cricket - one of Hickenlooper's restaurants - when he allegedly killed Detective Donnie Young....

The way the system works now - or doesn't work - is that the Social Security Administration checks numbers from employers and advises, on an annual basis, when the numbers don't match. With the letter comes a warning that you can't fire someone simply because he's got a bad number.

Even with multiple warnings on an employee, covering any number of years, there is no guideline as to what action an employer should take.

There's a wink. There's a nod.

But everything has changed at Wynkoop Holdings. Donnie Young is dead. Garcia-Gomez is on the run, possibly to Mexico.... Driscoll put two employees on the case, working a full week each, matching employees with bad numbers.

They found 107 people, 51 of whom still work at the restaurants, including 34 who have received multiple notices from Social Security.

The 51 employees have 30 days to prove they're legal or they're gone - to some restaurant not owned by Hickenlooper.

And so this won't come up again, Wynkoop will now use the new software to screen Social Security numbers at the time of hire. No match means no job. There's no law forcing Wynkoop to do any of this. There's a political reality that begins and ends with restaurants owned by mayors.

Driscoll is explaining the process and then says, "Dealing with these immigration issues is the first time in my life I'm ashamed to be an American."...

Ask Hickenlooper about the policy and he says people want it both ways - for him to effect change at his restaurants and, at the same time, for the restaurants to remain in a blind trust.

He insists he never knowingly hired anyone who was here illegally when he was Hickenlooper the restaurateur, and, since this was a phone call, I don't know if he winked.

But what is clearly true is that Denver is not a sanctuary city - not if that means it's somehow different from other cities. If you listen to talk radio, or Tom Tancredo, you'd think Denver was the Big Rock Candy Mountain for illegal immigrants, who race here for all the goodies city officials are handing out. But the only service I can see that isn't federally mandated is that, as in most cities, cops don't turn you over to immigration if you have an accent and you run a stop sign....

Mike Littwin's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Call him at 303-892-5428 or e-mail him at littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com.

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