Senators Juan Pichardo, D-Providence, left, an opponent of the governor’s effort to crack down on illegal immigrants, and Marc Cote, D-Woonsocket, a sponsor of the E-Verify bill, attend a Labor Committee hearing last month. The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

PROVIDENCE

The frenzied immigration debate that has engulfed Rhode Island politics and produced more legislative bills here than in almost any other state, ended with a thud over the weekend when a final proposal to crack down on illegal immigration collapsed in the waning hours of the 2008 Assembly session.

A controversial “E-Verify” bill requiring private employers to check the immigration status of new hires passed the House in April for the second year in a row before sputtering out in the Senate amid concerns about its constitutionality.

Finger-pointing was in high gear yesterday as bill sponsors and Governor Carcieri blamed the Senate leadership for thwarting the proposal and the governor sought to make connections between the need for such legislation and the reduction of violent crimes like the alleged kidnapping and rape by an undocumented immigrant two weeks ago.

Of the E-Verify bill, the governor said: “It was being blocked by the leadership and that shouldn’t happen. … They should have let it go to the floor and let the members vote.”

But Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano said, “The bill was unconstitutional, as drafted, in the opinion of the Senate lawyers and therefore it did not pass.”

Montalbano’s concerns and those of Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed came out of a federal court ruling in Oklahoma, where this month a judge blocked enforcement of a similar law on the grounds that state governments don’t have free rein to enact their own immigration policies. A similar legal challenge in Arizona survived, though judges in both states ruled that the government could not impose monetary fines for violators. An Oklahoma appeal is pending.

Those unanswered legal questions, combined with strong opposition from religious and business leaders and the state’s American Civil Liberties Union affiliate was reason enough to hold off on the Rhode Island bill, Senate Labor Committee Chairman Daniel P. Connors, D-Cumberland, said yesterday.

Sponsor Sen. Marc A. Cote, D-Woonsocket, says he was aware of the constitutional concerns and scrambled to remove a requirement that employers who don’t cooperate pay fines of up to $5,000 a month. The reworked bill instead ordered employers to sign forms pledging that they’d used the system to check out new workers, under the penalties of perjury.

But Cote said the leadership never gave him another hearing and instead summoned him to Montalbano’s office late last week to tell him the bill was dead.

Montalbano says the inaction was a matter of timing: “There was no time left in the session to put it through the paces a second time in committee.”

Cote and House sponsor Jon D. Brien, a fellow Woonsocket Democrat, reject that justification, noting that dozens of rewritten bills received last-minute hearings, some of them held in hallways on the last day of the session.

“I feel badly for the people of Rhode Island because I know this bill was based on public discourse on this issue and the majority of people were supportive of this bill,” Cote said.

While E-Verify received widespread support on the House side and garnered 18 co-sponsors in the Senate, other lawmakers warned that it could prompt racial profiling and discourage the undocumented from contacting the police when necessary. And it’s unclear just how many Rhode Islanders outside of the State House support the concept, which has been legalized in a dozen other states.

By an executive order that Carcieri issued in March to cheers from his supporters, state agencies and vendors began using the E-Verify system last month. This month, President Bush signed an executive order mandating that federal contractors use the E-verify system to check the immigration status of new hires.

But the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union insists the E-Verify program makes too many mistakes to be relied on. The Social Security Administration has acknowledged that the program contains 17.8 million flaws that could spell rejection for Rhode Islanders who should be able to work, the ACLU says.

Lawmakers eager to crack down on illegal immigration counter that claim. E-verify and other bills submitted this session –– including one midyear budget cut that removes undocumented children from state-funded health insurance, as well as fizzled plans that would have denied drivers’ licenses and workers’ compensation to the undocumented –– are logical steps toward solving the state’s budget problems, they say.

Much of that argument has come from Rep. Peter G. Palumbo, D-Cranston, who this spring flooded the talk-radio airwaves and repeatedly stood on the House floor promising that months of research convinced him undocumented immigrants cost the state well over $127 million a year, including $87 million for education, $32 million for welfare benefits and $8 million for incarceration.

State and federal officials have questioned Palumbo’s math. The U.S. Department of Education said despite the lawmaker’s insistence, that agency “can’t be cited as the source for such estimations.”

Similarly, the state Department of Corrections said it “does not make a connection between the number [of inmates] who are Hispanic and the number who are illegal,” in compiling prison statistics, as Palumbo suggest it does.

“His numbers are a lot of rhetoric and I told him that,” said fellow Rep. Thomas C. Slater, D-Providence, who listened to Palumbo testify before the House Finance Committee in April on the accuracy of his numbers.

With legislators gone for the session, the Assembly’s immigration battle has drawn to a quiet close for the year, but the debate showed no signs of subsiding in other political circles yesterday.

In a statement released late in the day, the governor cited the recent arrested of Marco Riz, an undocumented immigrant who allegedly kidnapped and raped a Warwick woman, as “a sad and vivid example of why he issued his executive order.” The governor blasted Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline for refusing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, failing to notify them when Riz was arrested last year.

Cicilline shot back in his own release: “It is disgraceful that the Governor of the State would willfully distort the position of the Providence Police Department, undermining the work of these brave men and women and effectively accusing them of being accomplices to the actions of a criminal.”

cneedham@projo.com