WASHINGTON –Today, Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) introduced the SAFE HIRE Act, a new bill that would implement strict penalties on executives that hire illegal immigrants.

“While liberals like Gavin Newsom pretend to care about human rights, the sad truth is that the Democrats’ open borders agenda is really about undercutting American wages and ensuring their billionaire donors have a constant supply of cheap, foreign labor,” said Moreno. “So let’s make this simple, executives who abuse illegal immigrants with slave wages should be held personally liable and face severe consequences if they’re caught. This cannot be a country built on servitude, American workers must come first.”

The SAFE HIRE Act requires: 

  • Publicly traded company executives and human resources officers (“certifying officers”) to certify the accuracy of their employment practices and employee legal work status in their annual SEC reports, including an evaluation of internal compliance controls.
  • Executives are also required to disclose to both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) any “significant deficiencies” in their internal processes that could impact their ability to comply with federal employment eligibility requirements and any known violations of the federal legal work regulations. 
  • Companies to file a list of all disclosed deficiencies and violations with DHS and DOJ in their public annual report filed with the SEC, including whether or not they’ve hired illegal workers
  • Executives who lie about these reports can be fined up to $1,000,000, imprisoned for up to 10 years, or both
  • Penalties are even more severe (up to $5,000,000 fine and 20 years imprisonment) for executives whose companies hire illegal aliens.

Background: Following along the path of the overwhelmingly bipartisanSarbanes-OxleyAct of 2002, which held corporate executives personally responsible if they cooked their books, Moreno’s legislation would for the first time hold executives accountable for disregarding America’s immigration laws.

Read the text of the bill HERE.