Anyone who has applied for a job, or hired somebody, is familiar with the requirement to fill out an I-9, the official U.S. government form designed to verify the identity and employment authorization of individuals hired in the United States. It’s a significant burden on both employee and employer.
As part of that process, the employee is required by law to produce a document that proves those two attributes; people typically use a passport, a permanent resident (green) card or a Social Security card. The employer has to stipulate that it has reviewed them.
In the wild case of Ian Roberts, until recently the man running the largest school district in Iowa, one of two things must have happened. Either nobody checked and verified those documents or Roberts, who was born in Guyana and first came to the U.S. on a student visa, forged them.
Not an ideal action by someone hired as a school superintendent in a major Iowa city.
Yet more disturbingly, it appears this happened with Roberts on several occasions as he moved up the educational career ladder from job to job after studying on a track scholarship at Coppin State University. According to a release from the Des Moines public schools, Roberts went on to study at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and earned an MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
What the Des Moines School Board now knows is that Roberts also was the subject of a “final order of removal” issued by the U.S. Department of Justice and signed by an immigration judge. The Department of Homeland Security told the school board that Roberts was in the country illegally and had a prior weapons possession charge. Roberts reportedly is now appealing his deportation.
We are going to leave aside the question of what Roberts did or did not do in regard to weapons, since those charges, like much else in this case, seem murky to us. We’re also not writing here about the specific merits of the deportation case against him and, by all accounts, we can see that he had many fans of his professional work.
But we are not aware of any evidence that he is either a U.S. citizen or a person with work authorization, either through marriage or the process by which highly qualified persons achieve work authorization, often through an H-1 visa, leading to permanent residency. Maybe some will turn up; Roberts reportedly has hired a lawyer.
We are writing, though, about how several school districts and other entities either ignored the I-9 form verification process or were easily duped by it. So much for E-Verify, the web-based system wherein employers can electronically verify the employment eligibility of their new hires by comparing their information with government records. You’d think that when it comes to a position running an entire educational system, someone would have availed themselves of that option. (The Des Moines School Board has said it outsourced its background checks; the limitations of doing that now is all too clear.)
We want to be clear on one other point. An argument could be made that Roberts is a charming, competent guy who is well liked in his job and that I-9 forms and immigration checks for employment should be abolished. In the current political ferment, some progressives are making precisely that claim. But if you are going to make that argument, then you should be clear that you are essentially arguing for offering automatic permanent work authorization to everyone who arrives in the U.S. Otherwise, you slapping the face of any immigrant who follows the rules.
If we are going to ask someone in a meat-processing factory to fill out that form, and then deny them a job if they cannot produce authorization, then why should a school superintendent making $286,000 per year be allowed to skate along without doing so? How could anyone possibly make that argument?
That’s not to say immigrants should not be welcomed.
What should have happened here, assuming all Roberts’ achievements are genuine, is that he should have been clear about his status and one of the potential employers should have acquired an H-1 visa for him. Most MBA graduates of M.I.T. would qualify as someone the U.S. should welcome to live and work here. As a side note, although it was not an issue in Roberts’ case, here’s evidence of why President Donald Trump’s plan to impose an egregious $100,000 fee for H-1 visas is a terrible idea. Not all the people who can and should qualify are tech whizzes and not all employers, especially school districts, have $100,000 sitting around that they can afford to send to the federal government.
Certainly, the Roberts case suggests that immigration enforcement would be far more helpfully focused on incompetent employers and persons who have made a long-term habit of deluding them, not on picking up low-income folks on the streets of Chicago who are just trying to help their families.
One wonders how many cases like this one are out there. Immigration laws have brought chaos for years.
Des Moines School Board Chair Jackie Norris told the Des Moines Register that “in hindsight, there is nothing we would have done differently.”
Is she kidding? By Tuesday afternoon, the Des Moines Register had reported that Morgan State University, where Roberts claimed to have earned his doctorate, had said he received no such degree.
A lawyer for Roberts said Tuesday that Roberts wished to resign. If Norris still does not think she and her board should not have acted differently in this case, she should do the same.