Yesterday Richard Stana of the Government Accountability Office told a House panel that under the Bush administration workplace enforcement of immigration violations had fallen sharply. For instance, consider the numbers of employers who received formal letters warning about possible fines for violating immigration laws:

Under Clinton in 1999: 417 employers
Under Bush in 2003: 3 employers

In part this is certainly due to more focus on the border and on possible terrorism, and ICE does have a specific program targeting illegal aliens working at sensitive facilities: see the fairly frequent arrests at Navy shipyards for examples.

However, no doubt a good part of the drop-off is due to "other factors."

Complete details in "Employer sanctions decline" (also here as "Auditors find drop in immigration enforcement at worksites"), or in "Critics cite lax efforts to enforce federal worksite immigration laws".

UPDATE: There are more quotes in "Witness says ICE lax on employers".

UPDATE 6/23/05: Unfortunately, Drudge is linking to the Reuters report "Lawmakers seek to crack down on illegal immigrants" from Alan Elsner. As a breezy introduction to current issues, it's OK, but it is somewhat misleading and it buries the lede. It starts out:

Life for the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants living in the shadows in the United States could soon get even tougher as states and the federal government pass new legislation cracking down on them...

It goes on to mention Arizona's Prop. 200 without mentioning the efforts in Arizona to block it or reduce its impact, then it quotes the National Council of La Raza (National Council of The Race), then it mentions Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)'s guest worker program, then it quotes the NCLR again.

Only in the 12th paragraph does it say this:

In recent years, the government has done almost nothing to enforce the law banning the employment of illegal immigrants.

That and the next paragraph discuss the content of the rest of this post. Then, it gives a paragraph to what was discussed in the post "Can employers verify Social Security numbers?" and it closes with a quote from Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute.