Suman Raghunathan

(E)-Verifying More Problems for Immigrant Workers

Oh, Brother. And I don’t mean that in terms of Charlie Brown’s G-rated euphemism for an expletive. I mean it in terms of Big Brother in George Orwell’s classic novel of government intrusion into citizens’ private lives – 1984.

The latest development in the feds’ penchant for eavesdropping on Americans (now combined with stubbornly misguided enforcement-only policies on immigration) is a federal lawsuit filed against the state of Illinois, which recently passed an excellent law barring employers from using a faulty, underused, and as-yet unfinished federal database of immigrants authorized to work in the US called Basic Pilot.

Hurray for Illinois, boo to the feds’ myopic efforts to address the nation’s broken immigration system by cracking down on immigrant workers.

Wondering why Illinois is putting its foot down when it comes to using this hackneyed system? Allow me to explain.

Unfortunately, the Basic Pilot moniker is apt. That’s just what it’s been so far: a pilot program, untested in the scale the federal government is proposing – i.e., to apply to all employers and immigrant workers in the US. Alas, the database, recently re-named E-Verify by the spinmeisters at the Department of Homeland Security, also has only a 50% accuracy rate. And it can take up to ten days to respond to employers’ questions on work authorization. Clearly, it’s not verifying much.

Before I begin to wax rhapsodic on E-Verify’s demonstrated inability to really verify much except errors within its own ranks, allow me to explain.

E-Verify is a hypothetical federal database that would eventually be a souped-up version of the existing Basic Pilot system, which allows employers to verify if an immigrant employee is indeed authorized to work. Basic Pilot’s records include immigrants who are naturalized US citizens, as well as other immigrants legally in the country who can, as a result, work in the US – such as those with green cards. It’s a voluntary system, and less than half of employers (around 22,000) now regularly use the system to verify the work authorization of around 2% of US employees. Problem is, the information from the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security that’s supposed to go into the E-Verify database is notoriously shoddy. As in the pitiful 50% accuracy rate I mentioned earlier.

Great. The federal government wants to force employers to make decisions on hiring or firing employees based on a database that makes around 1.5 million errors a year. Seems like an efficient way to enforce myopic immigration laws, right? Wait, there’s more. Studies of the existing Basic Pilot and other employer databases found immigrant naturalized US citizens were 250% more likely to be wrongly identified as ineligible to work. Yup, that’s right. More than one in ten naturalized US citizens are incorrectly coming up in this database as undocumented. And that’s not because someone else is using their Social Security number – it’s because there are so many errors in the system.

To put the icing on the cake, this is one of the few instances where even the libertarian Cato Institute agrees with me. In fact, I was at a Congressional staff briefing where Jim Harper, a Cato Institute privacy expert, estimated that not only would implementing the E-Verify program result in these 1.5 million errors (if not more) annually, it would also cost a minimum of $50-$79 billion dollars.

Excellent. A high price tag for a program that doesn’t even work and will actually hurt not just immigrant workers, but native-born ones as well.

I’ve written before about why a program like E-Verify would do much more harm than good based on the history of letters sent out by the Social Security Administration’s No-Match program (which informs employers when it thinks it sees something fishy in an employee’s records). We already know that unscrupulous employers use error-ridden verification systems like the SSA No-Match program (and, by extension, the E-Verify program) to prey on their workers and force them to accept lower wages and poor work conditions.

Take a study of past No-Match letters sent out by SSA. Employers who received these letters didn’t immediately fire workers whose records were flagged as suspect. No, that would be too easy. Instead, employers waited until just the right moment to use the information (whether correct or not) against workers that were getting ornery. One in four employers waited to fire a worker until the worker complained about poor safety or working conditions. One in five employers fired a worker after she or he attempted to unionize.

The result? Immigrant workers will be pushed further into the shadows, driving down wages, work conditions, and unionization rates for all workers. Now tell me how that’s going to respond to our nation’s reality on immigration.

Bravo, Illinois. You join the ranks of other states like my very own New York that have seen the light on practical immigration policy. We welcome you.

Suman Raghunathan: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 2:00 PM, Sep 26, 2007 in Immigration
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