Portions of Georgia's new anti-immigration law will go into effect on January 1. The law is part of a recent state-level campaign to create restrictive immigration enforcement laws that go beyond federal law. Starting in Arizona in 2007, numerous states have passed anti-immigration laws that have proven highly popular, but Arizona's experience should be a warning to Georgia.
Section 12 of the law requires employers with 10 or more employees to sign up with the E-Verify program, with phased implementation for all employers through mid-2013. E-Verify is a federally run electronic employment verification system designed to weed out undocumented workers by verifying the identity information of prospective employees against a federal database.
E-Verify has not worked as intended. According to a December 2010 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, of the 2.6 percent of workers who are denied by E-Verify, many are citizens or legal immigrants caught in the regulatory net. According to a 2009 audit of E-Verify conducted by Westat, about 1 percent of legal American workers - both immigrants and citizens - will be denied employment by E-Verify.
Meanwhile, 4.1 percent of initial E-Verify results are simply wrong. If E-Verify applied to the entire employed civilian workforce in Georgia, more than 45,000 citizens and legal immigrants to Georgia could be denied employment by E-Verify.
Many of these mistakes are due to incorrect information in government databases. Workers have a maximum of 120 days to sort out errors with the government. But the government has a lot of information on us. Thus, a denied worker must file a Privacy Act request to discover which bit of information is incorrect. In 2009, a Privacy Act request took an average 104 days. Those delays will increase as more employers sign up for E-Verify.
Other E-Verify mistakes are caused by user error and identity fraud. Employers are busy running their businesses; they are not experts at navigating government websites. Often times the inclusion of another space at the end of an employee's name or a hyphen confounds the system and rejects the worker. Instead of expanding their businesses, employers will have to comply with complex regulations--hardly an economic growth strategy.
E-Verify is also ineffective. Employers depend on identity information given by the employee themselves, so the system fails to catch 54 percent of undocumented workers. You read that right--E-Verify misses more than half of all undocumented workers and that percentage will increase as E-Verify creates more of an incentive for undocumented workers to buy forged identity documents on the black market.
Those errors and problems with E-Verify are one reason why Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform argues that every American should be issued a national biometric identity card. For anyone who cares about individual privacy and freedom, that's enough reason to abandon any and every government regulation that could lead to a national identity card.
Another unintended consequence of E-Verify is that it shifts "unauthorized workers into less formal work arrangements," according to the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California. Mandating E-Verify in Arizona did not remove many undocumented immigrants from the labor market, but instead pushed them deeper into the black market.
Since E-Verify was mandated in Arizona in 2008 (the law was passed in 2007), businesses in the state have suffered. Indications are that the GAO and Westat studies under count E-Verify's failures. MCL Enterprises, which owns 24 Burger King restaurants in Arizona, reported that over 14 percent of its employees were initially deemed unauthorized by E-Verify. They were later cleared for legal employment.
Ken Nagel, co-owner of two popular (and delicious) restaurants in Phoenix tried to hire his American-born daughter, but she flunked E-Verify. In mid-2010, Mike Castillo, owner of PostalMax in Scottsdale, 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, Castillo said, "I don't think people are going to really embrace E-Verify."
Moreover, most Arizona employers are ignoring E-Verify. From late 2008 to late 2009, 1.3 million people were hired in Arizona but only 732,455 E-Verify checks were made. Good laws shouldn't make the black market more attractive, which E-Verify certainly does.
Georgia is wise in not applying E-Verify to businesses with fewer than 10 employees, but the smartest policy is avoiding invasive workplace regulations like E-Verify altogether. A flood of new regulations from Washington is a major reason why the economy is so rotten. Adding E-Verify on top of that will only hurt Georgia's recovery.
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Probe reveals feds pressuring agents to rush immigrant visas – even if fraud is feared
http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/01/03/010312-news-immigration-strife-1-3/
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Obama, like the Bushes, Clinton & Reagan don't care how far immigration drives down wages in the lowest paying jobs!
As a result, USCIS data indicate that E-Verify immediately confirmed about 97.4 percent of almost 8.2 million newly hired employees as work authorized during fiscal year 2009, compared to 92 percent from fiscal year 2006 to the second quarter of fiscal year 2007. "
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11146.pdf
This is comment entirely divorced from reality or any research. No one with even barest journalistic integrity would write such a fantasy.
"legal immigrants to Georgia could be denied employment by E-Verify." What legal immigrants are walking around w/o any papers? It's federal law for them to have papers with them at all times and in order, IAW federal law!
Don't fire the employee right way but tell them that is problem with his/her
documentation and the problem has to be cleared up within a reasonable
amount of time ( say two weeks). By that time the employee should have
been able to prove eligibility to work in the US.
In a Free Market System/Capitalistic System each person's Labor is considered part of their personal Capital. In a free market people are supposed to be free to pool and organize their Labor Capital as they see fit. But in a business that is based on using people working in the USA illegally, it is easy to replace the organized people (the Workers) with the next wave of Illegal Workers, thus destroying the Workers free market pooling of Labor.
The creation of a large pool of unemployed Labor to keep wages down used to be called Labor Pool Economics. It is the tactic of the Robber Baron designed to keep wages low and destroy workers personal Labor Capital much as a business will try to monopolize a market by destroying the funding sources of their competitors. That is about as anti-capitalist as it gets.
Samuel Gompers, Founder and first President of the American Federation of Labor: "Every effort to enact immigration legislation must expect to meet a number of hostile forces and, in particular, two hostile forces of considerable strength. One of these is composed of corporation employers who desire to employ physical strength (broad backs) at the lowest possible wage and who prefer a rapidly revolving labor supply at low wages to a regular supply of American wage earners at fair wages..."
Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations.
The first, and best, employee I ever hired read it, and his entire attitude about the economy changed.
1. It cites 2009 and 2010 "studies" on e-Verify as if they are the current state of the system. Apparently nothing ever improves over time.
2. Is it a problem that e-Verify supposedly only catches 46% of Illegal Immigrants trying to work illegally? If preventing 46% of those who try to break from doing so is bad, then so is something that helps catch 46% of bank robbers or 46% of anybody breaking any other law.
3. If 2.6% or 4.1% of the e-Verify results have problems because of errors in the data then this is a problem – for us and our future benefits, not for business. E-Verify is based on Social Security data. Isn't it important to get it fixed so that someone does not miss out on future social security benefits? If the government was really doing a god job of notifying people of problems with their Social Security data why is the database not 100% accurate.
4. Apparently this Author has never been through a Payroll Audit. Otherwise he would know that hiring people off the books is difficult at best. Comparing miss-marched Social Security contributions with the over 7 million Illegal Immigrants currently working in the USA shows most Illegal Immigrants work on the books. To hire them off the books requires millions of business owners and staff to suddenly decide to begin breaking the law. Not going to happen.
Of course, open borders and unlimited immigration means that third world immigrants will keep moving to the U.S .until the standard of living in the U.S is the same as the standard of living in Mexico.
Why do so many people want to keep lowering the standard of living in the U.S.?