House Moving Toward Mandatory Worker Verification |
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"Jobs are scarce, and families are worried. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 7 million people are working in the U.S. illegally. These jobs should go to legal workers," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas. Is it about jobs creation? Not really, except perhaps for government workers required to follow through on the employment checks. But a mandatory verification system as Republicans envisage it would certainly have a broad impact on U.S. business. Immigration Subcommittee ranking member Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said it would decimate the nation's agriculture industry, where illegal immigrants fill about 75 percent of the jobs. The American Nursery and Landscape Association said that mandatory verification alone would simply drive businesses and workers underground and off the tax books. In the worst-case scenario, it drives those jobs overseas. Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif., who chairs the subcommittee, is acutely aware that Americans might not take farm-worker jobs. "If we have an unmet domestic need, let's find a way to do it in a legal way but not open the floodgates" to legalizing an illegal workforce, he said after the hearing. (That statement appears to stray from Republican talking points, considering that GOP leaders are opposed to any form of legalization for undocumented workers.) Agriculture is the only industry speaking out about the adverse effects of a mandatory verification system. In the past, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups protested mandatory checks, but they have softened their stance in hopes of winning other concessions from the government on access to legal foreign workers and more safe harbors against prosecution if they show good faith in complying with the law. Businesses have warned that a flood of requests to the government from some 7.7 million worksites would overwhelm the system. Even the smallest hiccups or errors in the confirmations could create a Y2K-like logjam that could affect how employers operate. The E-Verify program is voluntary for most employers. (It is required for some government contractors.) Employers use the system to check hires' names and identifications against Homeland Security Department and Social Security Administration databases. About 850,000 worksites are registered to use E-Verify, representing about 11 percent of employers, according to DHS. A few years ago, the rate of "tentative nonconfirmations" for actual legal workers"i.e., false negatives"was about 8 percent, but DHS cleaned up the system to the point where those wrong responses are hovering around 2 percent, said Richard Stana, the Government Accountability Office's homeland security & justice director. He cautioned, however, that employers sometimes punish workers whose initial confirmation is negative by limiting their pay, restricting their hours, or even firing them. "This is wrong," Stana said. Another problem with E-Verify is the percentage of "false positives": unauthorized workers who are validated as legally in the United States. According to the research group Westat, about 3 percent of employer checks yield that result, although Stana says that figure is hard to nail down because those errors are more difficult to catch. Sometimes employers are complicit in helping undocumented workers clear the system, he added, either by telling them to use identification that's harder to check or offering them assistance in using valid Social Security numbers. | ||||||
| Last Updated ( Friday, 23 December 2011 ) | ||||||
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