Controversy surrounds E-Verify system for immigration checks

A voluntary electronic system to verify employees' immigration status, and thus their right to a job, expired Friday but is likely to be reauthorized by Congress as part of a budget bill due to come up for a vote this week.
Yet, even though President Obama has called for it to become the law of the land as part of a comprehensive immigration overhaul, the system, known as E-Verify, has become the subject of heated debate.
In wrestling with ways to make immigration laws enforceable, many Democratic and Republican policymakers believe that an effective, mandatory system to check work authorization would deter illegal immigration by making it harder for undocumented immigrants to find jobs in the United States. Such a plan could be more effective than border enforcement and immigration raids at restoring integrity to the nation's immigration system, they say.
Supporters of E-Verify say the Internet-based system, which checks a newly hired employee's identifying information against Social Security and U.S. Department of Homeland Security databases, is quick and easy and has become increasingly accurate in recent years.
"It's really doing a nice job," said Janice Kephart, national security policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. "It's a win for employers, a win for the country, a win for our government."
But critics -- including business and labor groups and civil libertarians -- say that the system remains fraught with error and could lead to wrongful layoffs. They say it encourages discrimination against workers who appear foreign and promotes more under-the-table hiring.
"We have not taken the effort to go through and fix the errors in people's files before we use this as an enforcement tool," said Timothy Sparapani, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Until we do, this system will be nothing more than a fanciful wish."
A government evaluation of E-Verify released last year found that in 96 percent of cases, an employee's work authorization was confirmed immediately, up from 94 percent in a previous study. Of the remaining cases, .4 percent of the initial mismatches were confirmed after further checking. The final 3.5 percent were never confirmed, either because they were not authorized to work (as Kephart believes) or because (as Sparapani fears) they were fired or not hired without being given a chance to remedy a problem.
"You're talking about taking away someone's livelihood and potentially imposing sanctions on an employer based on a database that's not accurate," said Caitlin Vega, a legislative advocate for the California Labor Federation. "It's our hope that it won't be expanded as a mandatory program."
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined with the ACLU last month to help scuttle a plan that would have required employers who receive federal stimulus funds to use E-Verify. Obama has put on hold a Bush-era regulation that would require federal contractors to use the system. Meanwhile, some Republicans, led by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, are considering expanding the program's use in a catch-all government spending bill.
"It would be a bomb-thrower kind of amendment outside the context of the immigration debate," said Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. "We know that electronic verification is something we need and it will be part of whatever immigration reform we pass, but to do it outside of that is not good public policy."
Since 1986, employers have been required to confirm that a newly hired employee is authorized to work in the United States. Workers fill out an I-9 form and show identification to prove citizenship or legal immigration status. But employers say they can't always tell if an ID is fraudulent. And some look the other way.
The government began a pilot electronic system in 1997 that is now available in every state. As of January, 100,000 employers have signed up and 6.6 million queries were run in 2008, double the year before.
Fifteen states now require some or all employers to participate. But in Arizona, which began requiring E-Verify in January 2008, a recent study by the University of Arizona found that fewer than 6 percent of employers had signed up. Other research found that undocumented workers there were now more likely to use a stolen ID or to work off the books.
As conservatives like Sessions call for more widespread use of E-Verify, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, has called for a review of the program. If the system became the law of the land, it would need to process 63 million queries a year.
"We feel it would not be a problem to ramp up to mandatory," said Sharon Rummery, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. "Our computer system could accommodate that."

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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