When Congress held hearings this summer on sweatshops and the garment industry, actress Jaclyn Smith turned down an invitation to stop by. The "Charlie's Angels" icon, who lends her name to a clothing line sold by K-Mart, said none of her apparel comes from sweatshops.
Apparently, she never saw a series from The San Francisco Chronicle from a few months before.
"Crime Without Punishment," investigating how the INS lets employers who hire undocumented immigrants off the hook, showed a shop full of women hunched over sewing machines in New York, stitching garments with the Jaclyn Smith label.
Paradox at work
With the help of Paradox, the series uncovered a long-standing pattern of employers flouting immigration laws while the feds looked the other way. Of about 12,000 cases filed by the INS against employers over five years, more than 7,000 resulted in no fines or punishment of any kind. The average fine was about $1,600 - small change for most companies.
Big companies routinely negotiated fines down to zero, and then got the official records sealed. Agricultural growers, one of biggest hirers of undocumented workers, were hardly ever visited by INS inspectors at all. That was especially true in California, where farm interests are big contributors to Gov. Pete Wilson.
Pulling the three-day series together took almost two years. The project began when Chronicle reporter Aurelio Rojas decided to examine the INS emphasis on controlling U.S. borders rather than workplaces.
He first FOIA'ed the INS in early 1994, asking for a record of every case the INS had pursued against employers for the last five years. He got stonewalled for months. But in the summer of that year, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner visited The Chronicle. Rojas slipped her a letter and explained his plight.
Covered in paper
A few months later, an envelope three inches thick landed in his mailbox. It was the INS records, and they appeared almost completely useless.
There were more than 12,000 records listing businesses, addresses, fines assessed and fines that were actually paid. The records were in alphabetical order by business name. There was no way to sort all the paper.
I had worked with Paradox and other database programs, and knew they could help make sense of the information. As the editor on the project, I suggested going back to the INS and asking for the disk or tapes that had generated the records. The INS refused, saying the computer information didn't exist.
So, we fed all 12,000 records into a scanner and transferred them into Paradox for Windows. That was a major improvement, until the realization hit that the scanner didn't always see numbers and symbols the way we did. The machine, for example, had sometimes read "$" as "5," turning a fine of "$10,000" into one of "$510,000." Cleaning up and double-checking all the data was a slow, painful task.
Irrefutable facts
Once the data was in good shape, however, it revealed more than the INS could refute. Rojas traveled California, the Southwest and New York, visiting farms and factories. When he visited INS district offices armed with our findings, regional directors could not believe he had obtained the information he was showing them.
Even after being confronted with The Chronicle's findings, the INS has fought every step of the way. Without computer analysis, getting through their records would have been almost impossible.
"I'm still waiting to get individual case files for some employers, which I requested in May 1995," Rojas said.
"Crime Without Punishment" ran in March, shortly before Congress opened hearings on immigration law and sweatshop employers. Meissner promised quick reforms of how the INS allocates its resources. And closer to home, the series brought in $10,000 from readers for the families of three Mexican men electrocuted to death in a farm accident in California's San Joaquin Valley.
April Lynch can be reached at (415) 777-8432, or send e-mail to lyncha@sfgate.com.