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But First You’ve Got to Verify it Lee-gally

Posted: 7/8/2009 - 0 comment(s) [ Comment ] - 0 trackback(s) [ Trackback ]

Tags: Collaboration, Workforce

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) didn’t reveal the names of the 652 companies agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be visiting. But last week’s report that a crackdown on employers via audits of their workers’ I-9 forms showed that the Obama administration wants to establish its chops on illegal immigration. But it will be taking a different tack than the Bush administration, which arrested large numbers of the workers themselves.

If you want to make sure companies verify the eligibility of their workers, fine. But that means tools must be available for employers to do so at a minimum of effort and cost. It means the databases the government maintains for the specific purpose of eligibility verification must be accurate, and that is a tall order.

The checkered and much-argued-over e-Verify system is DHS’s system of choice for employers to check eligibility against. It uses information from the Social Security Information. Its use is voluntary except for Federal contractors, who will be obligated to use it starting Sept. 8. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has postulated that every employer should be compelled to check the eligibility of every worker in the U.S.

A couple of years ago, e-Verify exhibited accuracy rates too low to make it a practical system. Now DHS claims accuracy rates of above 99 percent. A 99.9 percent accurate rate would produce 1,000 errors per million queries. When you compare that to the estimated five percent of jobs in the U.S. held by illegal immigrants, e-Verify doesn’t look so bad.

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