Every American who has a job or wants one should be following the debates in Congress over bills to crack down on illegal hiring. Employment verification is one of the few ideas still lurching around the Capitol after last year’s Senate shootout mowed down a forest of immigration reforms. It’s boring and complicated — it’s about databases — but unlike other immigration fixes, it affects every worker and employer in America, native-born or not.Two House bills — the SAVE Act, sponsored by Heath Shuler, and the New Employee Verification Act, sponsored by Sam Johnson — are designed to squeeze illegal immigrants out of the country by making it impossible for them to find work.
Immigration reform is always tricky, but employment verification is where the details get demonic.
It starts with a flawed database that everyone would have to rely on to get work or change jobs. Think of the “no-fly” list, the database of murky origins with mysterious flaws that you, the passenger, must fix if you are on it and want to fly. These immigration bills seek to take small, badly flawed “no-work” lists and explode them rapidly to a national scale. With an error rate of about 4 percent, millions of citizens could be flagged as ineligible to work, too.
That’s only part of the price. The Congressional Budget Office says the SAVE Act would cost $40 billion over 10 years, adding up lost tax revenue and spending on things like thousands of immigration judges. It is likely to overwhelm the Social Security Administration, which already is swamped with disability benefits and retiring baby boomers. It won’t do much for small businesses that would have to pay to comply.
The problem is not with employment verification itself. Illegal immigrants should not be allowed to work, and any system that is rational and lawful needs to be backed up with a hiring database. The trouble with these bills is that they don’t fix the database errors first, and they are strict enforcement-only measures, uncoupled from any path to legalization for undocumented workers.
Apr 17, 2008
NY Times: Fix The Database First
From a New York Times editorial:
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3 comments:
What a crock, but I wouldn't expect anything else from the NY Times. Numident errors are not the No Fly list.
If there is an error on your Numident you are told what is wrong and what you need to provide to correct it.
Which office can you go into to get your name off the No Fly list?
"The trouble with these bills is that they don’t fix the database errors first, and they are strict enforcement-only measures, uncoupled from any path to legalization for undocumented workers."
Why in the world should anyone here illegally and working to boot get any path except the one leading out the door.
So how many trillion a year is the U.S. budget and it going to cost 40 billion over 10 years to fix things. So 4 billion a year isn't much of a couple trillion dollar budget.
How can the database be fixed first? Unless you get a no match message how would anyone know there was an error that needs to be fixed. SSA has sent out no match letters to some number holders again and again and most do not bother to come in and get their records corrected. Some errors are clerical in nature by either the person who applied for the number or the SSA employee who entered it into the system. My experience in 31 years with the agency was that most are caused by the applicants - they will use nick names or other names than their legal name on their birth certificates, many do not know where they were born (they put down where they grew up), etc. I had people argue with me about the place of birth on our records - when we had them bring in their birth certificates to "correct" our records, nearly all of them were surprised to learn where they were actually born. They never stopped to think that the hospital might be in a different town than where their mother was living.
Put simply, the database cannot be corrected until the correct information is obtained. The correct information cannot be obtained without the cooperation of the numberholder. If the number holder will not cooperate, he should be banned from employment. Why is that so hard for the media to understand?
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