by Alex Meneses Miyashita
Mississippi is joining a group of a half dozen states that require employers to use a federal work verification program to make sure their hires are eligible to work legally in the country.
The employee verification program, known as E-Verify, has so far been adopted by Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Missouri and Oklahoma. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour approved the requirement March 17.
In the U.S. Congress, two bills are pending that would require use of E-Verify nationally.
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates there were more than 7 million undocumented workers as of 2005. Critics are raising concern of the system which they claim would have adverse effects on all U.S. workers, some of whom particularly emphasize its potential impact on foreign-born legal immigrants and citizens and others even on small business owners.
Tyler Moran, employment policy director for the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center, estimates there are close to 50 bills pending at the state level which incorporate obligatory use of E-Verify into their language.
But Moran noted that out of nearly 60 bills introduced last year, only a handful of them became law and some states, including conservative ones, have been rejecting the idea.
Idaho, Indiana and Virginia have recently struck down such bills.
At the federal level, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas) recently introduced legislation that would require employer verification for all new hires within three years. Another bill, sponsored by Reps. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) and Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.), sets the time at four years.
Supporters of the latter bill are signatures in a House procedural move, known as a discharge, to skip committee processes for the bill and bring it directly to the floor.
The petition has 181 of 218 needed lawmaker signatures to do so as of the spring recess.
Run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, the Internet-based system checks employee names against Social Security numbers to verify that these are correct.
The system was launched in 1996 under the name Basic Pilot, and has been available since for employers to use voluntarily.
Of particular concern to critics are the existing errors in Social Security Administration and Homeland Security databases which the federal government itself has documented through commissioned research.
These error-prone databases could weed out on average thousands of workers, daily, from being immediately eligible for hire, they claim.
“There will be plenty of workers, particularly at the low end of the socio-economic ladder, who can’t navigate that process,” said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., during a March 25 briefing.
The SSA data has an error rate of 4.1 percent, meaning that information is inaccurate for about one in 25 individuals, according to Harper, citing data from the Inspector General’s Office at the SSA.
Moran, of the National Immigration Law Center, said DHS database errors disproportionately impact legal foreign-born workers.
Citing from a recent study commissioned by the DHS, she said that foreign-born workers are 35 times more likely than U.S.-born workers to be incorrectly deemed unauthorized to work initially.
Naturalized citizens are also much more likely than native citizens, 10 percent vs. 1 percent, to be incorrectly identifi ed as not being authorized to work, Moran said. Hispanic Link.
