Life and the border / La vida y la frontera
The Deseret Morning News begins a three-part series today on immigration, legal and illegal. The series explores immigration's impact on the lives of people in both the United States and Mexico, as well as the resulting interdependence of the two nations' economies.

During the past legislative session, Sen. Carlene Walker, R-Cottonwood Heights, brought an issue to her colleagues' attention: It was illegal for the Department of Workforce Services to notify clients who may have had their identities stolen.

In fact, department employees faced up to a year in prison and up to a $2,500 fine for disclosing that information.

The legislators were startled. When Walker sponsored a bill to decriminalize such notification, it received unanimous support in both the House and Senate.

"They felt frustrated — their hands were tied, because they couldn't help people," Walker says of the department's employees. "Something needed to be done to help them disseminate this information."

Under the new law, the department has sent out notifications to the first 100 department clients whose children may be victims and is notifying new clients whose children show adult incomes.

However, the group of 20,000 or so clients who may have had their identities stolen is "the tip of the iceberg," Walker says. That led her to sponsor a resolution that calls on Congress to pass laws protecting people against identity theft, which also sailed through the state Legislature.

But the issue of identity theft is a federal one, says Richard Hamp, Utah's assistant attorney general who handles identity-theft prosecutions, along with his team of five investigators and a victims advocate.

"It's unfair that the federal government has not done anything to solve this problem and is leaving this problem to the states," Hamp says. "It's a terrific drain on the state."

As many as 9 million Americans' identities are stolen each year, according to an estimate by the Federal Trade Commission.

When a worker's information doesn't match the Social Security Administration's records, that worker's Social Security earnings are sent to an electronic suspense file. By 2004, that file accounted for about $585 billion in wages from some 264.1 million W-2 forms, says Dorothy Clark, agency spokeswoman.

It's unclear how much of that is due to illegal immigration, she says, because money can end up in the file in other ways, such as if a name change because of a marriage isn't reported to Social Security.

If the information is corrected, the earnings are reported back to the owner's file, says Clark. If not, it remains indefinitely in the suspense file, which has been around since 1937, she says.