Trust but E-Verify

The fate of the E-verify program is drawing more and more attention in newsrooms across the country, with the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation each taking up the issue from opposing views. With the current economic environment, there is no way in my view that the E-verify system is not extended and bolstered. Here is an excerpt from Cato and Heritage:

How to save E-verify - grow the federal government From Cato:

But the productive sector would be less productive under his eleven-point plan for E-Verify, which I will review and critique ever-so-briefly:

• Require universal employment verification. Taking E-Verify national would increase yet again, in yet another way, the burden on productive U.S. employers. It’s the kind of bureaucratic accretion that Republican revolutionaries in 1994 came to town to stop.
• Reauthorize E-Verify and provide adequate funding for implementation. Spend that billion dollars (and get rid of those revenues).
• Improve government data to further reduce erroneous tentative non-confirmations and provide opportunities for individuals to review the accuracy of their personal data in government files. Among other things, this is the idea that there could be a system in which people could use government-licensed contractors to check whether the information about them in government databases was correct. Perhaps “government-licensed contractors” would do a better job than the government itself of preventing identity fraudsters from checking the information of other people, but it’s not likely. At its core, a national E-Verify system requires a national biometric database to work well.
• Penalize employers who continue to employ workers who have failed verification. These are those fines - luckily, not jail - for employers.
• Facilitate information sharing between DHS and SSA. That’s dataveillance. There will be a lot more of it in the future. Real-time or near-real-time monitoring of your behavior through your data.
• Increase penalties, in law and in practice, for unlawful hiring. More fines on employers and more money spent on enforcement.
• Issue clarifying letters to employers regard­ing Social Security mismatch notifications. This sounds innocuous, but “clarifying” in this case creates the legal predicate for fining employers when they have failed to be good deputies of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
• Do not restrict state efforts to limit the em­ployment of illegal aliens. This doesn’t directly grow the federal bureaucracy. It suggests states should force employers to submit to federal bureaucracy.
• Establish supplemental procedures to pre­vent employment by means of identity fraud. Again, a national ID is essentially required to implement a national system for adjudicating personal rights, but Rector proposes something less: a complex program where people would be notified if it appeared that their identities were being used by others in the employment sector. The logistical and data security issues with this are forbidding. It’s something like describing how to build the cathedral of Notre Dame by saying, “Well, you put up a church . . . .”
• Establish supplemental procedures to reduce “off-the-books” employment by illegal aliens. More dataveillance and more penalizing of employers.
• Incorporate the current new-hire data collec­tion for child support into E-Verify. Yet more dataveillance - rolling employment information about every American into federal government databases.

Last week at the Heartland Institute’s 24th Anniversary Dinner, Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation debated immigration policy with Peter Brimelow of VDARE.com. Hornberger returned again and again to the theme that immigration law is a statist interference with the freedom of migrants and citizens alike.

He did not force the scales from the eyes of Brimelow or many of the other immigration opponents in the room, but people who appreciate freedom and limited government hope for the day when those scales do fall.

Reducing illegal immigration through e-verify Heritage Foundation:

Since employment is the magnet that draws illegal immigrants into the U.S., it follows that the best way to reduce illegal immigration is to shrink the employ­ment magnet. To accomplish this without resorting to the method of routinely rounding up and deporting thousands of illegal workers only to have them return and obtain another readily available job, policy should focus on the businesses that hire illegal immigrants and let general employment rules rather than individ­ual arrests drive the reduction in illegal immigration.

The policy should be based on the principles of empowerment, deterrence,and information. It should empower honest employers by giving them the tools to determine quickly and accurately whether a new hire is an authorized worker. It should hold employers free from penalty if they inadvert­ently hire an illegal worker after following the pre­scribed procedures.

Further, the policy should empower honest employers by freeing them from the burden of com­peting with dishonest businesses that deliberately hire illegal workers. This means that it must deter dishonest employers who willfully employ unveri­fied and unlawful workers by imposing substantial penalties on the employers when such hiring occurs. For deterrence to work, however, both the government and employers must have timely and accurate information regarding new hires.

The most promising solution to this problem is a tool called E-Verify. A real-time, Web-based verifica­tion system run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administra­tion (SSA), E-Verify can determine with great accu­racy the authenticity of the personal information and credentials offered by new hires. In most cases, verification occurs almost instantly.

Later...

Of the millions of illegal immigrants in this country, the best evidence suggests that some 50 percent to 60 percent of this employment occurs "on the books."[3] It is unclear how much "on-the-books" employment of illegal aliens is done with fic­titious information and how much is done by iden­tity fraud.

To reduce illegal immigration, all three means of illegal employment must be addressed, but this need for a broad approach should not be used as an excuse to do nothing. Although it is true that reduc­ing "off-the-books" employment will be the most difficult task, that does not mean that the govern­ment should do little or nothing about the high lev­els of "on-the-books" illegal employment until it has devised a foolproof means of stopping underground employment as well. Proper policy should take the critical first step of controlling "on-the-books" employment of illegal aliens.