House lawmakers heard competing proposals designed to ferret out the number of illegal workers in the labor market in a year when even modest attempts at immigration reform appear to be a difficult task. ...
The discrepancy between competing workplace verification proposals was on full display Tuesday, as a House Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee heard two ideas for changing the role of the nation’s electronic verification system, also known as E-Verify. ...
A bill by Rep. Health Shuler (D-N.C.) would mandate that the E-Verify pilot program currently in use by some 61,000 employers be uniformly adopted by the estimated 7.4 million employers across the country. ...But already a competing and wholly different employment verification proposal is emerging from another bipartisan group in the House.
Social Security Subcommittee ranking member Sam Johnson (R-Texas) and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) have introduced legislation to require only newly hired employees to be subject to verification. They called their bill superior to Shuler’s proposal. Giffords said that Arizona’s experience using E-Verify has been less than stellar.
Many businesses in her state are finding E-Verify “complicated, unreliable and burdensome,” Giffords said. “From our experience in Arizona we know what isn’t working.”
The Johnson-Giffords New Employee Verification, or NEVA, Act, would check only new and non-citizen hires against the “new hire reporting” database put in place by states 12 years ago to track down so-called deadbeat dads, and would not rely on the Social Security Administration (SSA) or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), they said.
Johnson and Giffords found a warm reception from Social Security subcommittee Chairman Michael McNulty (D-N.Y.) who homed in on how E-Verify is leaning heavily on what he said was already an overburdened SSA. ...McNulty questioned Shuler and Calvert on E-Verify’s impact on SSA, and reminded them of the average wait time — well over a year — for a Social Security disability claim to be processed in their districts.
“Imposing a substantial new immigration-related workload on SSA would potentially swamp the agency and threaten its ability to serve our constituents who rely on Social Security and SSI for basic income,” McNulty said. “For this reason, proposals for mandatory verification that do not realistically address the workload placed on SSA’s shoulders should not be enacted.” ...
Despite their differences in approaches — which aides described as deep on Tuesday — lawmakers on both sides followed their testimony with statements indicating that some kind of common ground could be found.
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May 6, 2008
Competing Proposals Aired At Social Security Subcommittee Hearing
From The Hill:
You seems to have left out this comment
ReplyDelete"We believe this new system could eradicate virtually all unauthorized employment, thereby eliminating a huge incentive for illegal immigration,” said Susan Meisinger, president and chief executive officer of the Society for Human Resource Management, in voicing support for the Johnson-Giffords measure."
I'm not sure how this could stop all unauthorized employment. How can SSA do anything other than verify that the number holder is a citizen or someone authorized to work in the U.S.? It will still be up to thousands of employers to verify that the person applying for the job is the number holder. Without a reliable method of identifying every worker unauthorized employment will continue.
ReplyDelete"I'm not sure how this could stop all unauthorized employment."
ReplyDeleteThe E-Verify system has a photo of the alien from the EAD or I-551 application in the system, so if 10people try using the same person's info they should get caught.
"In 2007, E-Verify created the Photo Screening Tool in order to enable participating employers to determine whether certain documents produced during Form I-9
completion are fraudulent. This new tool adds security to employers hiring processes
by reducing the risk of identity theft, which provides further assurance that new employees are authorized to work. Employers now have the ability -- through a system query -- to match certain photographs produced by new employees when completing
the Form I-9, with the photograph that appears in the records of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The employer’s conclusion concerning whether the
photographs match will lead to either a final confirmation of employment eligibility or a
Tentative Non-confirmation."
No system is perfect, but the E-Verify system is better than doing nothing.
The photo screening tool only has information about immigrants, people who have been given ID cards with photos by DHS. Native born US citizens don't have any photos on DHS computers.
ReplyDeleteSo, if I'm an illegal immigrant, I'd buy a fake SS card with a real SSN on it and the real US citizen number holders' name (which have been checked as valid against some information reseller website, or I got them from a US citizen friend or relative) . Then that name/SSN combo would fly through E-Verify.
E-Verify can't yet catch multiple uses of the same SSN/name. That's why Shuler wants everyone with two jobs to visit an SSA field office to prove ID and paychecks. That's about 45 million people, which is just about how many people walk in to SSA field offices per year already.
Catching on yet how "not perfect" doesn't mean good enough?
So other than doing nothing what is your idea?
ReplyDeleteEnforce labor laws.
ReplyDeleteMake DHS do their own work.
Create a realistic immigration policy that addresses economic realities that some jobs require guestworkers. Europe does it - they also have national id cards. So let's bite the bullet and create a national id card without trying to do it cheaply this way by piggybacking on the successful Social Security programs and wrecking them in the process.
But maybe that's the agenda here - to wreck Social Security, so that when the next ideologue says we should privatize it, they'll be more successful because SSA will have lost the confidence of every taxpaying American instead of just the ones who have become disabled.