On Wednesday, September 21, the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send Rep. Lamar Smith's (R-TX) Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 2885) to the House Floor. Now the rest of the House of Representatives will get a chance to debate this monstrosity.
The Legal Workforce Act, if it becomes law, will mandate universal use of a massive new workplace regulation called E-Verify, an electronic employment verification system designed to weed out undocumented workers. It would require all employers to feed the identity information of every prospective employee into a federal database that verifies the information with the Department of Homeland Security and state DMVs.
If the worker is cleared for employment, as happens 95.3% of the time, then that employment is legal. If the worker is not cleared to work and a tentative nonconfirmation (TNC) is issued, the worker and his employer then have a certain amount of time to contest the decision or identify and correct errors and inconsistencies in the worker's identification. If the worker is unsuccessful in contesting the government's decision, he is issued a final nonconfirmation (FNC) which means the worker MUST be fired.
But that is just the surface explanation of how the system works. In actual practice, E-Verify is much more complicated and confusing. Worse, it puts another federal bureaucracy between the employer and employee.
E-Verify places significant burdens on businesses. When chipmaker Intel used E-Verify to screen many of its new hires in 2008, over 12 percent were initially given a TNC. All of the prospective employees were eventually cleared to work, but as Intel put it, "only after significant investment of time and money, lost productivity and, for our affected foreign national staff, many hours of confusion, worry, and upset."
In Arizona, the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) mandated E-Verify for all hires in the state. MCL Enterprises, a Burger King franchise with 24 restaurants in Arizona, reported that over 14 percent of its employees - including 75 percent of foreign workers - were initially issued a TNC by E-Verify. They were finally cleared to work after an appeals process and bureaucratic maneuvering.
The process is even worse for small businesses. Intel and MCL had human resources and legal departments that could handle E-Verify errors at a lower cost than most small businesses that can't afford to have such departments.
Ken Nagel of Phoenix is just such a small business owner. He co-owns two popular restaurants in Phoenix called Aunt Chilada's and Rustler's Roose. He tried to hire his daughter, a natural born American, but she flunked E-Verify. In mid-2010, Mike Castillo, owner of PostalMax of Scottsdale, Arizona, wanted to hire a part-time worker but a technical glitch in E-Verify made the filing difficult. It took a few days for Castillo to figure out how to open the government's computer file and then solve the problem. After that ordeal, Castillo said, "I don't think people are going to really embrace E-Verify."
He is right.
According to some estimates, most Arizona employers weren't even using E-Verify as of July 2010. From late 2008 to late 2009, 1.3 million people were hired in Arizona but only 732,455 E-Verify checks were made.
State Senator Thayer Verschoor (R-22), a vocal supporter of LAWA, is surprised that so many businesses aren't complying. He thinks that businesses, not the regulations, are the problem. He argues that the government needs to find better ways to enforce the law and business owners need to be "educated" about it. He went on to say that it's "risky business" for companies to avoid E-Verify because their livelihood is on the line.
Threats to businesses aside, Sen. Verschoor's support of E-Verify is quixotic, because it can't even accomplish its core objective of weeding unauthorized workers out of the labor market. According to a major 2009 audit by research service Westat, 4.1 percent of E-Verify's initial responses to employment verification queries were inaccurate and the system even failed to catch 54 percent of unauthorized workers.
Worse is E-Verify's alarmingly high rate of false positives. According to Westat, nearly 1 percent of legal workers are originally given a TNC by E-Verify. The costly and complex bureaucratic appeals to correct mistakes guarantee that many TNCs are just ignored. If applied nationally, the Immigration Policy Center estimates that about 3.6 million Americans would have to visit Social Security Administration offices annually to correct their information.
Even if E-Verify's error rate is dramatically lowered, as bureaucrats have repeatedly promised in congressional hearings, it will push many workers into the black market. According to a recent report by the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, LAWA unintentionally "shifted unauthorized workers into less formal work arrangements."
Immigration restrictions make the world a substantially poorer place than it otherwise would be. Large black markets, like the ones of undocumented workers, are a signal to governments that their laws are ineffective and do not comport with economic reality.
As the Latin American writer Alvaro Vargas Llosa wrote, "Whenever there is a disconnect between the law and reality, reality finds ways of making the law irrelevant." That is happening very quickly in immigration. Intrusive regulatory mandates like E-Verify are just expensive regulatory diversions.
Follow Alex Nowrasteh on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh
Just the threat of passing an e-verify law in my state make many nursing homes open their doors to english speaking applicants again. A few are beginning to hire legally. That is good for young kids who want a job while they train to become a nurse and good for that people in those homes can speak to those working with them.
If you love America, ask that your senator and congressman support e-verify. Our future depends on it.
The State of Colorado passed E-Verify in 2006
May 26, 2011 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court UPHELD the State of Arizona's mandatory E-Verity for the State's Employers, after 4yrs of litigation
http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/supreme-court-upholds-legal-arizona.html
E-Verify ~ the corner-stone of illegals not obtaining jobs in the USA, illegaly, any longer
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/illegal-immigration/map-states-mandatory-e-verify-laws.html
Except ...Alex,
1] "The Legal Workforce Act: Replaces the I-9 System: Replaces the current paper-based I-9 system with a completely electronic work eligibility check."
http://judiciary.house.gov/news/09212011.html
So Alex, it is not another federal bureaucracy, it replaces the I-9 system. Which according to Westat, "E-Verify is much more effective than the Form I-9 verification process used by employers not using the program." (Page 7)
http://www.uscis.gov/USCIS/Native%20Docs/Westat%20Evaluation%20of%20the%20E-Verify%20Program.pdf
2] BTW, Alex, it is the worker's responsibility to fix any TNC letter, not the employer.
Alex wrote, "audit by research service Westat...the system even failed to catch 54 percent of unauthorized workers."
Except ...Alex,
"Westat estimates that, primarily due to identity fraud, approximately half (54 percent with a plausible range of 37 to 64 percent) of unauthorized workers run through E-Verify receive an inaccurate finding of being work authorized." (Page7)http://www.uscis.gov/USCIS/Native%20Docs/Westat%20Evaluation%20of%20the%20E-Verify%20Program.pdf
Identity fraud is a felony. If it were easy to stop, it would not be happening at all.
Obama supports the inclusion of photo ID which would be a good start since many illegals use ID from retired legal residents..
September 21, 2011
"Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX) has just introduced legislation (The Refundable Child Tax Credit Eligibility Verification Reform Act (HR 1956))which would block illegal aliens from receiving any further child tax credits from the Internal Revenue Service."
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/bill-introduced-to-end-child-tax-credits-to-illegal-aliens/question-2173881/
As you are riding along..see a field full of people all stooped over picking your food, let's say in Texas where there is record heat this summer...say the temp is 103 degrees at the airport...it's a little warmer where they are..Don't it just PISS YOU OFF that you can't pull over...take off your suit coat and tie and your expensive shoes...walk right out in that field and chase those people back to where they came from and let YOU have your job back? It's unfair for them to have all the gravy jobs...that's why they don't pay very much...they have too much fun doing it. But since Tiffany doesn't charge newt interest...he could afford it..
Why, yes, there is a reason. Illegal immigrants cost so much less than legal workers doing the same work, or than investing in different approaches to doing the work, that farmers spend all their time lobbying for continued access to an illegal immigrant workforce.
During WWII, the Chinese, with a lot of manpower and very little capital equipment, built runways for airplanes by having thousands of peasants scrape a large piece of dirt flat by hand, bringing huge rocks out to the site in dump trucks, then having the peasants break the rocks into pea gravel with sledge hammers. It's amazing what you can do with cheap labor! That's not, however, how a first world country should go about its affairs.
At the end of the day, if there are crops like strawberries that require a tremendous amount of handwork, and we have to pay school teacher level wages to get legal American workers to do the jobs, fine, strawberries will get more expensive. Just like they are in Japan and other countries who don't import near slaves to do near slave work under near slave conditions.
Any legal worker who shows as illegal in eVerify would, presumably, want to find out and fix the whatever is causing the problem. It's a one time investment of time.
The Social Security Administration has taken no responsibility for policing misuse of numbers for way too long. eVerify will force them to clean up their part of this mess.
There are only three groups of people opposing mandatory eVerify: libertarians who believe hiring decisions are none of the government's business; illegal aliens and their enablers; employers wishing to preserve access to their illegal workforce.
All you "Progressives" out in Huffer land, please note that it is Democrats, Democrats, Democrats who are fighting eVerify, our best hope for making employers hire only legal workers!!
Whether the Social Security Administration accepts it or not, the Social Security number is the closest thing we have to a national ID, yet the SSA takes no responsibility for policing its misuse.
That's right ! How foolish that it was done in '86 !