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