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With the clock ticking on the life of a voluntary online system that helps employers make sure they are hiring legal workers, a House panel today heard from lawmakers, business owners and experts on what to do next. ...
Rep. Ken Calvert, who authored the first program to check on the legal status of workers, the Basic Pilot Program, told the House subcommittee on Social Security that the current program should be made mandatory. ...
But after he testified before his colleagues, Calvert said that he doesn't expect any significant immigration bill to pass this year. What is likely, he said, is that Congress will pass a temporary extension of the current system.
Today's hearing before a Ways and Means subcommittee and another session before the Education and Labor Committee are viewed by immigration-watchers as part of an effort by Democratic leaders to show they are taking steps to address immigration. More hearings are expected before the Memorial Day recess on different aspects of the immigration issue."Legislating in an election year, especially on immigration-related matters, is more like Kabuki theater than serious policy deliberation,'' said Doug Rivlin, spokesman for the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigrant group.
Forcing companies to use a government system to verify the legal status of workers would cause thousands of citizens and legal residents to be initially rejected for work and cripple the Social Security Administration, critics told Congress on Tuesday.
The system, known as E-Verify, is currently voluntary, but several proposals in Congress — including an immigration enforcement measure known as the SAVE Act — would make it mandatory. ...
he panel's chairman, Rep. Michael McNulty (D-N.Y.), said he was concerned that SSA offices could be overwhelmed with a "massive new workload" as U.S. citizens and other authorized workers try to correct their information. This could hurt efforts by the agency to reduce an unprecedented backlog of disability claims, he said.
Greg Heineman, president of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations Inc., which represents 3,400 SSA managers and supervisors, predicted that making E-Verify mandatory for all U.S. employees would result in an "onslaught" of more than 10 million more visits to SSA field offices.
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.
The National Committee was dismayed to learn that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost to SSA of the major immigration proposal would be more than $1 billion – nearly 10 percent of the agency’s administrative budget – in just the first year of implementation. Over 10 years, the plan would cost over $9 billion.
SSA has estimated that implementation of a mandatory E-Verify program would cost a total of about $281 million and require hiring 700 new employees for a total of 2,325 additional workyears for fiscal years 2009 through 2013.
