We provide to readers below a recent post on the website of the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association commenting on a new initiative in the Senate to extend the E-Verify program. Because we suspect that the expansion of the E-Verify program will likely be a cost of comprehensive immigration reform, we will keep track of such legislative initiatives. For those readers unfamiliar with E-Verify, it has been an ever expanding program which mandates its participants to clear the work eligibility of all new hires through a database administered by the Social Security Administration. Proponents of the program argue that the E-Verify program will markedly reduce the hire of undocumented workers, opponents contend that E-Verify is riddled with inaccuracies that could adversely affect the hire of legal immigrants and non-immigrants, and even citizens, in addition to being a costly program for businesses, especially small businesses, to administer:
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
There He Goes Again–Sessions and E-Verify
Senator Sessions cannot leave his hands off of E-Verify. Now in “stealth” mode, Senator Sessions has slyly introduced an E-Verify amendment (SB 1371) during today’s full Senate vote on the DHS appropriations bill.
The Sessions amendment calls for a permanent reauthorization of the Basic Pilot/E-Verify program, and mandates its use for all federal contractors and subcontractors - including the verification of all existing employees. This amounts to a massive expansion of a program that is still not ready for prime-time.
We must call our Senators and tell them to oppose this sneak attack by Senator Sessions for the following reasons:
It would impose exorbitant costs on businesses at a time when our economy is most vulnerable:
An economic analysis commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
concluded that the net societal costs of the program would be $10 billion a year
– a cost that would be felt disproportionately by small businesses.
It would make Basic Pilot/E-Verify permanent without addressing its well documented database inaccuracies:
A 2007 independent evaluation of the program commissioned by DHS found that
the Basic Pilot/E-Verify database “is still not sufficiently up to date” to meet
the requirements for “accurate verification.”
SSA has estimated that if Basic Pilot/E-Verify were to become mandatory and
the databases were not improved, SSA database errors alone could result in 3.6
million workers a year being misidentified as not authorized for employment.
This would result in 6 out of every 100 workers having to visit an SSA office to
correct their records or lose their job.
It would force workers and businesses to pay a high price for Basic Pilot/E-Verify’s inaccuracies:
Queries submitted to Basic Pilot/E-Verify by Intel Corporation in 2008 resulted
in nearly 13 percent of all workers being initially flagged as unauthorized for
employment. All of these workers were cleared by Basic Pilot/E-Verify as
work-authorized, but only after “significant investment of time and money”
and “lost productivity.”
We urge all AILA members to call their Congressman
