Tancredo: Mandatory E-Verify for Employment Should be Donald Trump’s Top Immigration Priority
Former member of Congress Tom Tancredo on Breitbart raises something that I had been thinking that the Trump administration would propose. He writes “Congress can turn off the jobs magnet by enacting the mandatory E-Verify program, an internet-based system allowing instant verification of the legal status of job applicants. It has an error rate of less than 1 percent and costs employers next to nothing.”
As USCIS describes it, “E-Verify is an Internet-based system that allows businesses to determine the eligibility of their employees to work in the United States. E-Verify is fast, free and easy to use – and it’s the best way employers can ensure a legal workforce” Under current law, the use of E-Verify is voluntary. A few states, including Arizona, require employers to use the system, which the Supreme Court has upheld. In order to make the use of E-Verify mandatory on all employers, Congress would have to act.
It is not clear to me that the mandatory use of E-Verify might not cause huge problems. The accuracy of E-verify has been improved over time. However, problems remain and have been described as follows:
“While the federal government has made strides in improving E-Verify, several significant challenges remain to ensure the accuracy of the electronic employment verification system, according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Jan. 18, 2011.
Following recommendations made by the GAO in 2008, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) took several steps to improve E-Verify by expanding the number of databases searched during the verification checks of newly hired workers and by instituting several quality control procedures. The GAO analyzed these changes and improvements in its latest report and found that the accuracy of E-Verify had reduced the number of “false negatives” and confirmed the work eligibility of 97.4 percent of employees checked through E-Verify in fiscal 2009—compared to a 92 percent accuracy rate in fiscal 2006.
However, the GAO found that some persistent E-Verify errors can create problems for thousands of workers who are eligible to work in the United States yet are identified falsely by the system as ineligible.”
KJ