Exactly What Do They Want?

I’ve been in Washington a while, and I thought I’d seen everything. But the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has taught me a new trick.

SHRM lobbies for the HR execs who do corporate hiring. It also opposes E-Verify. I suppose corporate hiring is easier if you can hire illegal workers, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that SHRM wants to kill a program that makes it harder to hire illegal workers.

But SHRM has taken Washington arts to a new level. SHRM says it doesn’t want to kill E-Verify. SHRM says it wants to replace E-Verify with a new, better program to prevent illegal hiring. A closer look shows that the SHRM alternative is doomed to fail – and will take years to do so. So for a decade, while the SHRM alternative is failing, no one will have a good tool to actually prevent illegal hires. Which may be precisely what SHRM wants.

Why do I think that’s the name of this game? For starters, because SHRM proposes to turn immigration enforcement over to an agency that has no immigration enforcement mission. SHRM wants a verification tool that is run by the Social Security Administration (SSA), with no role for DHS, the department that funds and runs E-Verify today. Under the SHRM proposal, SSA would be responsible for making sure that everyone in the U.S. is eligible to work. But SSA and its data systems are set up to administer a vast benefit trust fund, not to enforce the immigration laws. It is hard for SSA to justify using its trust fund dollars for missions that don’t directly benefit the fund and its beneficiaries, and aggressive enforcement of the immigration laws certainly doesn’t fit that description. So any enforcement system run by Social Security would be underfunded and run by people who are not experienced in enforcing the laws against hiring illegal immigrants. Which may be exactly what SHRM wants.

In fact, SSA’s inability to adapt its database for immigration enforcement was the source of some of the problems E-Verify has been criticized for. The difficulty that naturalized citizens sometimes encountered in correcting their SSA records was finally resolved after DHS redesigned its systems to act as a backstop to SSA’s records. If E-Verify were turned over to SSA and DHS’s backstop systems were scrapped, far more Americans would have to trek to a Social Security office to prove they are entitled to work. That of course would undermine both the program’s effectiveness and its popularity. But that may be exactly what SHRM wants.

SHRM’s other solution after scrapping E-Verify is to use a Database of New Hires. That database is run by Health and Human Services (HHS) to catch workers who don’t pay child support. It doesn’t check for employment eligibility (and why would it? That’s not what it’s built to do) and it has no uniform process to resolve a mismatch. Not only would the HHS system be ineffective at employment verification, it would be far too slow. Today, E-Verify provides automatic feedback, on line, 99.5% of the time for authorized workers. Could the HHS system match this performance? No. The HHS system is the reverse of instantaneous. Here’s how it works. First, employers send in a list of the workers they’ve hired. Not to the Federal government. To fifty state agencies. Then the state agencies send the information to HHS. The Federal government never communicates with employers at all. It tells the states about any problems it finds in the records and relies on the states to contact the employer. Imagine how popular employment verification would be if no one in America could get a job until the employer had mailed in the employee’s data, and the state government mailed it to the Federal government, and the Federal government mailed a reply to the state, and the state had then contacted the employer to say everything was fine. A system like that would be repealed before the first reply was delivered. Which, come to think of it, may be exactly what SHRM wants.

SHRM also claims that their proposal combats identity theft and document fraud more effectively than E-Verify. We’re always glad to hear good ideas for reducing identity theft. But SHRM’s proposal doesn’t qualify. It relies heavily on matching Social Security Numbers and names, as does E-Verify. But it does away with E-Verify’s tool for displaying the picture that ought to be on the ID the worker presents – a proven deterrent to document fraud. SHRM’s other, vague proposal is to have private companies investigate workers and then issue special IDs. But if the private investigators are hired by SHRM’s members, what incentive do they have to find that a prospective worker is actually using a stolen identity? A skeptic might conclude that the investigators are paid to qualify workers, not to disqualify them. And the investigators won’t work for free. What’s to stop the companies from passing the cost of these investigations on to workers desperate to get hired? Such a system could turn out to be an expensive and much-abused failure, discrediting employer verification for years. Or is that too exactly what SHRM wants?

Lots of people in Washington know that the first rule of government is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But the first rule of lobbying in SHRM’s book seems to be, “call it broke and fix it bad.” In fact, E-Verify isn’t broken. It’s the best available tool to verify employment eligibility.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy

Myth vs. Fact: Worksite Enforcement

Opponents of immigration enforcement continue to propagate mythical objections to the Department's enforcement efforts. Some have claimed we are unfairly targeting low-level employees and not the employers who hire them. Others have misstated the facts about our E-Verify system, claiming it is riddled with errors and harms legal workers at the expense of identifying illegal ones.

For the benefit of journal readers, I'd like to take a few minutes to separate these myths from the facts.

1) Has the Department stepped up its worksite enforcement efforts?

Yes. As you can see in the table below, arrests in worksite cases have jumped from a total of 850 in 2004 to 4,940 last year, including 863 arrests based on criminal charges. We have already exceeded the number of criminal arrests this year and expect that figure to continue to rise.

Fiscal Year	Worksite Criminal Arrests	Worksite Administrative Arrests
2004	165	685
2005	176	1,116
2006	716	3,667
2007	863	4,077
2008 (as of May 31)	875	3,000
Source: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

2) Is it true that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is only arresting low-level employees and not managers and supervisors?

No. Of the 863 criminal arrests in worksite cases last year, 92 were in the company's supervisory chain. Already this year, ICE has arrested 80 individuals in the supervisory chain. This follows the arrests of 389 illegal aliens on administrative immigration violations, the most ever arrested in a single-site worksite enforcement operation. Additionally, 302 of those arrested have been charged with criminal offenses, including identity theft, false use of a Social Security number, illegal re-entry into the United States, and other crimes.

Of course, when comparing employer to employee arrests, it's important to keep in mind that in most companies there will be a larger number of employees than employers and top-level managers. Moreover, cases against supervisors and employers are more complex, and often depend on proving knowledge and intent. Therefore, it often takes time to build a criminal case against an employer, but the charges and penalties will likely be more serious as a result.

3) Are these worksite enforcement efforts random or do they unfairly target well-established employers, as some have suggested?

No. Our efforts focus on three priority areas. We target employers who have built their business model on hiring an illegal workforce. We also focus on disrupting the infrastructure that supports illegal immigration, which includes aggressively targeting those who engage in identity theft, document fraud and/or human smuggling. And we want to ensure that our nation's critical infrastructure sites, like our airports, seaports, military bases and nuclear facilities are staffed with individuals authorized to work in the country. The vast majority of ICE's worksite enforcement efforts fall into at least one of these categories.

4) Does ICE conduct its worksite operations in cooperation with state and local authorities?

Yes. When ICE conducts an enforcement action, it coordinates with state and local law enforcement and those responsible for public safety in a manner that will not compromise the operation. ICE goes to great lengths to identify and address any humanitarian concerns of the individuals it encounters. ICE's worksite enforcement operations are the result of long and careful criminal investigations, not random targeting or haphazard planning.

5) Is the Department's E-Verify program riddled with errors and does it hurt legal workers at the expense of identifying illegal workers?

No. E-Verify is a proven tool currently used by more than 73,000 employers nationwide, with another 1,000 employers enrolling every week. I'd venture to say that if the system didn't work or was riddled with errors, very few employers would want to use it.

Under E-Verify, almost everyone who is authorized to work in the United States is immediately verified by the system. Only about 0.5 percent of those queried who are ultimately confirmed as legal workers receive what is called a "tentative non-confirmation" and need to correct their records.

An employee who receives a tentative non-confirmation has a right to contest it and update his or her information while he or she continues working. E-Verify does not require these workers to be immediately fired.

Of course, many non-confirmations relate to employees who are not legally authorized to work in our country – estimated to be around 5 percent of all workers sent through the system. But those who employ illegal workers have no grounds to complain when the system uncovers that illegality.

6) Can worksite enforcement alone solve our nation's immigration problems?

An enforcement-only approach will not fix this problem. We must find a way to meet our nation's temporary workforce needs in a legal manner while also securing the border and enforcing the interior. Ultimately, this will require Congress to act on comprehensive reform. Nevertheless, our Department will not turn a blind eye toward illegality. We will continue to meet our obligations to the American people under the law, which includes enforcing the rules at worksites.

Michael Chertoff

Debunking Three More E-Verify Myths

Third in a series on E-Verify.

I’ve explained how E-Verify works. It is an effective way to restrict illegal employment. For some, that’s the best reason to attack E-Verify. Today, I’m going to respond to three more myths that critics rely on.

1. Some claim that E-Verify is burdensome for employers. In fact, it’s a bit less burdensome than ordering books for the first time from Amazon.com. An employer enters data about a new hire into 5 to 8 fields – name, social security number, date of birth, and other data that an employer already records on the Form I-9. Then, for noncitizens using DHS documents, the employer compares the employee’s ID photo to the photo displayed on the screen. That’s it.

Anyone who has seen it done once can do it, and the process takes a few minutes. Understanding the rules that go with the process requires a bit of online training, but that takes at most an hour or two. Plus, E-Verify makes it unlikely that a company will get a Social Security Administration notice at the end of the year indicating that some of its new hires have Social Security Numbers that don’t match their names. So time spent now on verification will save hassles later.

You don’t have to rely on me, though, for assurance that E-Verify is easy to use.
As one commenter to this blog series wrote, “the E-Verify System is a great thing! Every employer should be using it. We use it here at work and it’s EASY, QUICK and COST EFFECTIVE. Absolutely no hassle at all! There is no good reason why any legitimate company employing legitimate people would not want to participate in this program.” In fact, an independent evaluation performed by Westat found that 96 percent of E-Verify employers agreed that the system does not overburden their staff, see page 65 of the report (PDF).

2. Another set of critics claims that E-Verify is discriminatory. They conjure up evil employers who disfavor certain ethnic groups when they apply government hiring rules. But if you’re worried about discrimination in administering ID requirements, E-Verify is the solution not the problem. Employers don’t have discretion to discriminate when they use E-Verify. The computers behind E-Verify don’t pay attention to ethnicity; they just ask whether the applicant’s records are in order. That takes the discretion, and thus the opportunity for discrimination, out of the process.

The other form of discrimination often mentioned in this context is the notion that people who need time to correct problems with their records will be fired, or that employers will only selectively apply E-Verify to some employees. The short answer is that E-Verify prohibits both. Employers must allow workers more than a week to contact Social Security or DHS to cure any problems with the workers’ records. (Once a new hire makes contact with the relevant agency, 95 percent of the time the problem is resolved within 2 days.) Employers who act against a worker earlier can be fined by the Department of Justice for a civil rights violation. The same is true for those who apply E-Verify selectively.

3. The final myth is that E-Verify does nothing about identity theft, so the system is easy to beat. Not true. The criticism might hold water if E-Verify did nothing but check for mismatched names and SSNs. But E-Verify does more than that. We are already implementing measures that make identity theft far more difficult. The system rejects the SSNs of workers who have died. And we are increasingly able to display the photo that should be on identity cards presented by workers. This “photo tool” has already identified hundreds of cases of document and identity fraud and prevented identity thieves from gaining unlawful employment. In the long run, E-Verify should allow employers to verify the photos on all identity documents that are accepted for employment.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments. For more information on E-Verify, visit the E-Verify web page.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy

Debunking the “E-Verify Capacity Problem”

Second in a series on E-Verify.

Another myth is that the E-Verify program doesn’t have the capacity to handle the heavy load that would result if many states adopt laws requiring its use.

Critics say that only 60 thousand employers are registered with E-Verify, while there are 6 million employers in the U.S. But this is an example of using an accurate statistic to produce a misleading result. Many of those 6 million employers won’t hire a single worker this year. Others will hire thousands.

What counts is how many individual hires the system can handle. And on that measure, E-Verify is performing well. In fact, it is rapidly becoming a commonplace experience for U.S. workers.

According to the Department of Labor, there were 7.8 million non-farm new hires in the first two months of 2008. In the same period, over a million new hires were checked through E-Verify. On that basis, E-Verify is handling one in eight new hires already. Even more conservative estimates that include agricultural hires show that E-Verify is handling at least 10 percent of all new hires in the U.S. this year. Either way, there’s no reason to think it won’t be able to handle further expansion. Indeed, the number of employers in the system has quadrupled in just the last year (from 16,000 to more than 66,000), and we’ve performed more queries in the last seven months (3.58 million) than we did in all of 2007 FY (3.21 million). Based on a recent load testing, the system has the capacity to handle 240 million queries a year. That’s three to four times the number of people who are usually hired in a given year.

Many businesses are beginning to recognize the value of E-Verify. It helps protect them from incurring penalties for employing illegal immigrants. State legislators are also recognizing the value of the program, encouraging their contractors and licensors to sign up. Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Utah currently have legislation or executive orders that encourage or require the use of E-Verify.[*] We’ve welcomed the states’ confidence in E-Verify, and we’re confident that the program is well-positioned to handle the growth we foresee in future years.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy

[* update 1: Illinois was mistakenly included in the original post.]
[* update 2: added "encourage"]

Debunking the “E-Verify Error Rate”

Everyone agrees that illegal immigrants cross our borders because they want to work here. If we can reduce the lure of illegal employment, we can reduce the pressure on our borders.

That’s exactly what E-Verify does. When an E-Verify employer hires a new worker, the employer gets on line and fills out a short electronic form. As soon as the employer hits “send,” the system checks to make sure that the worker’s name matches his Social Security Number. If the worker is not a U.S. citizen, the system also checks to make sure his work authorization is still valid and shows the employer the picture that should be on the DHS-issued identity card. For most workers, verification is instantaneous.

E-Verify is simple, free, and highly effective in preventing illegal work. It works, and maybe that’s what the interests arrayed against E-Verify don’t like. Whatever the reason, opponents of E-Verify have resorted to charges that just don’t hold up. In this series, I debunk the myths.

The opposition to E-Verify often claims that the program has a high error rate. Some critics claim that the error rate is as high as 4% and will lead to millions of Americans losing their jobs by mistake.

To see how wrong this claim is, we need to look more closely at how E-Verify works. We can draw a precise picture of what happens to a thousand applicants who use E-Verify by using data gathered from October 2006 to March 2007 by Westat, an independent reviewer.


Of the thousand, 942 are instantly verified. Instant verification of legal workers surely can’t be an error.

Fifty-eight are told that they have to do something more to establish that they are lawfully authorized to work. Usually this means they have to go to Social Security to correct the mismatch in name and number. (Typos and similar problems are cured on line, so legal workers usually have a problem only if they changed their names or citizenship status but failed to tell Social Security of the change.)

So five of the thousand must go to Social Security and straighten out their records. For 90% of them, the process takes less than 2 days. Is that an error rate? If so, it’s ten times lower than our critics claim. And, is it really an error to tell workers that their social security credits aren’t being properly recorded? Sooner or later, the worker will want to collect benefits, and they won’t want to face doubts about who earned the credits. (Of course, straightening out Social Security records isn’t fun, but we’re working to reduce the hassle. Just a few weeks ago, we introduced software changes that will automate some of the correction process, reducing the number of legitimate workers who have to go to Social Security offices from five to two or three per thousand.)

That leaves the 53 who walk away. Is that an error rate? There are certainly people who believe it’s an error to keep illegal workers out of the U.S. workforce. But we don’t. It’s our job to enforce the immigration laws.

And common sense suggests that the walkaways are overwhelmingly likely to be illegal workers. It’s just common sense that a legal worker wouldn’t want to walk away from a job he applied for--and has been offered if he straightens out his records. It’s just common sense that a legal worker wouldn’t walk away from the opportunity to correct Social Security records he now knows are wrong – records that will have to be corrected for him to get benefits. And it’s just common sense that about five percent of E-Verify workers would walk away, since a Pew Foundation expert recently estimated that 4.9% of U.S. jobs are held by illegal workers. It’s hard to see the walkaway rate as an error; in fact, that’s the program working as it should.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy

An Immigration Enforcement Tool That Works - For Everyone

Most employers tell us that they don’t want to hire illegal workers. They just aren’t always sure how to tell who’s legal and who’s not. That is where E-Verify comes in. It’s a free and voluntary program that lets employers quickly check the status of new employees online.

E-Verify is an enormous success. It works to make sure the workers’ name and social security number match, and that noncitizen workers are authorized to work. The system is good at keeping illegal workers out of the workplace. About 5% of all the workers who are checked by the system cannot establish that they are authorized to work in the United States. Most of them walk away when they are challenged, even though it’s easy for legal workers to fix their out-of-date information in the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) database. (Actually, it’s not just easy. It’s a really good idea and will help legal workers get Social Security benefits more quickly if they are hurt on the job or when they retire).

What about legal workers? We don’t want to make getting a new job more difficult than it should be. Here too, the story is a good one. For 98% of the workers who are actually authorized to work in the US, the system returns an instant green light – not even a data mismatch to update. Put another way, for practically everyone except the 5% who aren’t legal, E-Verify provides instant verification. No hassles, no sweat, no window for discrimination. Of course, getting to this point has taken a lot of sweat on the part of DHS. We asked Westat, a respected research firm, to do independent evaluations of E-Verify five years ago and again this year, and the Westat evaluation showed that the “instant green light” rate has risen exponentially in those years, thanks largely to improvements in DHS records.

We’re not resting on our laurels, though. We’re working to get from 98 to 99% or higher. We won’t get to 100% because the 2% of work authorized new hires who get a “yellow light” often have forgotten to update their Social Security record. Perhaps they didn’t tell Social Security when they became a U.S. citizen, or when they married and changed their name. Since that’s a problem that needs to be fixed, some would say that they should be pushed into fixing it. However, we are trying to reduce even those cases. Our newest enhancement will allow E-Verify to check naturalization records electronically, even for people who have never notified Social Security of their new status. (The Westat report does not mention this enhancement, since it will not be implemented for another month or so.)

Early next year, we also will provide a 1-800 number to resolve SSA “yellow lights”, which will eliminate time-consuming personal visits to government offices. As an even longer-term improvement, we plan to regularly update the SSA database with naturalized citizen data to prevent mismatches in the future. In addition, we will continue to bring more of our records on line, so that no worker gets a “yellow light” because our records are not up to date; that effort is also underway.

At the same time, we are improving the enforcement capabilities of E-Verify. In order to prevent illegal workers from simply stealing the name and Social Security number of a legal worker, we are putting photos on line, so employers will see the photo that should be on the ID the worker presents.

As a result of these changes, E-Verify is a remarkable success story. The number of employers using it has doubled in each of the last few years, and enrollments are increasing by a thousand employers a week.

It’s an iron law of Washington, though, that if you actually take immigration enforcement seriously, you’re going to make a lot of powerful interests angry. And so it’s not a surprise that the success of E-Verify has engendered a big increase in criticism.

Probably the most aggravating claim, made in a recent article by a business lobbyist, is that E-Verify could increase discrimination against immigrants. I don’t understand why a business representative would accuse his own industry of being prone to discrimination, but even if that’s so, E-Verify won’t make employers more likely to discriminate. In fact, the Westat report found that employers using E-Verify said they were more willing to hire foreign-born workers, not less. Rather than promoting discrimination, E-Verify is actually becoming a safeguard against discrimination, because it objectively verifies the employment authorization of foreign-born workers who might otherwise be the subject of subjective guesses about employment eligibility.

Stewart A. Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy