Immigrant benefit ban taken out of budget

The Senate rejected on Tuesday a controversial provision that would have denied workers’ compensation benefits to undocumented workers who are injured on the job.

House Republicans added the amendment last month to the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation budget over objections from Democrats. At the time, Senate President Larry Obhof, R-Medina, indicated that the Senate might not go along. And as predicted, it was stripped from the budget bill Tuesday before it passed out of committee, setting up a full Senate vote next week.

“I understand what the House was attempting to do, but it’s a pretty big policy issue, and it needs to be vetted, and we need to make sure there aren’t any unintended consequences,” said Sen. Jay Hottinger, R-Newark, chairman of the Senate Insurance Committee, which removed the controversial provision.

Supporters of the provision argued that undocumented immigrants make up significant segments of the workforce, particularly in farming and construction.

“Every dollar paid in compensation to people here illegally is a dollar that legitimate employers have to pay into the BWC system to pay those benefits, or a dollar that is unavailable for legitimate, hard-working, legal aliens and legal workers,” Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, said during a spirited floor debate in May.

But, Hottinger said, the bureau does not collect Social Security numbers and is not equipped to determine

whether a worker is a legal citizen. If the bill were to pass, he said, injured workers would simply be asked to check a box signifying legal citizenship.

There was concern that challenges to workers’ citizenship, Hottinger said, could lead to improper profiling.

Plus, employers pay workers’ compensation premiums for each worker, so if someone is injured on the job, that person is either going to get help paying medical bills from the bureau, or going to be treated in an emergency room through indigent care.

“The appropriate place for it to be taken care of is through the employers who are already paying those premiums,” he said.

Lawmakers are not hearing from the bureau or employers that this is a problem, Hottinger said. In fact, there is concern it could provide employers incentives to hire more undocumented workers.

“One of the arguments is this could have some bad actors out there who say they can hire these guys and not have to pay workers’ comp on them,” Hottinger said.

Michael Shields, a researcher at the liberal Policy Matters Ohio, told the committee on Tuesday that blocking undocumented immigrants from help paying for medical bills and lost wages would help companies that break the law by employing them. That would “shift the cost of the Workers’ Comp system to law-abiding employers, and the cost of injury to these workers onto the taxpaying public and overstrained hospital emergency rooms,” he said.