E-Verify: It's Electronic!
Kerry Howley | June 11, 2008, 1:47pm
Yesterday I attended a House subcommittee hearing on "e-verify," a now-voluntary federal system that verifies the legal status of people working for a very small number of U.S. employers. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) has introduced a bill that would make the system a regulatory requirement for every employer in the United States, over objections from people who say a national rollout of a program built on faulty databases will be a bureaucratic nightmare. There is also the question of whether citizens should have to ask the Department of Homeland Security for permission to work.
Also in attendance was Traci Hong, a naturalized American citizen who apparently had to visit the Social Security Administration six times before she was permitted to work. Hong also happens to be an immigration lawyer working for Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who chairs the House subcommittee on immigration and citizenship. There are very few people on Earth who can navigate the immigration bureaucracy as well as Hong, but it took her a week to clear her status with the SSA. Hong was in D.C. and could demand some kind of attention; imagine the same situation for a legal Spanish-speaking worker in rural Arizona.
Throughout the hearing, Shuler relied on various degrees of innumeracy while accusing employers of "exploitin' immigrant labor" and forcing people to endure "inhumane desert conditions." The social security database e-verify uses has a 4 percent error rate, though Shuler claims the overall system has an error rate of half a percent. Both of those numbers sound insignificant. Iowa Republican Steve King says "The accuracy of the e-verify system is remarkable!" and "almost perfect!" But 4 percent of 153 million workers is 6,120,000. (Half a percent is 765,000.) That's a lot of people who will have to wrangle with the federal government before showing up at the office.
There is reason to doubt the half a percent claim, which relies on some highly dubious conjectures on the part of the DHS. Currently, 5.8 percent of e-verify submissions come back as a mismatch, and employees can contest if they like. Half a percent fight back and eventually get permission to work, as Traci did. 5.3 percent "walk away from the process." "They're illegals!" exclaims DHS. That's certainly one explanation, and some number of them surely are undocumented. But last week in Phoenix, I was hearing stories of legal Latino workers who were fired as soon as e-verify registered an initial problem. One study has found that a third of employers who use e-verify illegally "pre-screen" employees, meaning that they simply won't hire anyone who isn't immediately approved. Not everyone walking away is undocumented. They're just workers with suspicious last names who happen not to be high-powered immigration lawyers working on the Hill.
Even if none of this worries you, shouldn't we be at least a little bit alarmed by something called "e-verify" in 2008? It sounds like something Prodigy would have rolled out when I was nine.
Joe Dokes | June 11, 2008, 4:44pm | #
Kinnath,
First off you ALREADY have to prove you are legally entitled to work in the country anyway. The 1986 Immigration reform act did that.
Ever notice that when you get hired you have to show TWO forms of ID. What you fear is ALREADY a reality, wake the fuck up.
My issue is either your for completely open borders, which is fine, I have no problem with that, but don't sit there and say, no I want immigration control, and then turn around and deny government the power to control the borders.
Other Matt,
My let's be honest here, was about the issue of open borders, be honest say, "Open the fucking borders."
I personally think that we've had open borders for the last 30 years, and some people say, "Hey there are some negative consequences to being Mexico's escape valve." I personally think that the US can safely absorb a very large number of immigrants per year. But I also think that the days when the US can effectively absorb 1-2 Million unskilled laborers is over.
Now since about 1/2 of all illegal aliens enter the country legally and then overstay their visas, the question becomes how do we encourage them to leave. Well we could quadruple the size of the border patrol and use nazi like tactics and conduct raids of employers all over the country.
OR
We could actually enforce the law that has been on the books for 22 YEARS. That is employers have to verify that you are entitled to work in this country legally. I've worked at a number of companies where future employees when asked to verify their status showed social security cards that looked like they were made with a Russian mimeograph from the 1930s. These fakes were so bad, that a trained chimp could tell they were faked. Yet, when I asked my boss about this, he said, "the law requires that I ask for the documents, it doesn't require me to determine if they are authentic."
Thus, the employers have been hiding behind pathetically bogus documents for 20 Years.
Again, if you don't like the fact that you have to show ID to work, fine. but be honest and Say, "I want open borders." "I think any Haitian that can make a raft that can get him here is entitled to stay." But be honest.
regards
Joe dokes
MikeP | June 13, 2008, 3:43pm | #
TWENTY-FIVE Americans a DAY are killed by illegals, through drunk driving, murder, etc.
As seen in Steve King's diatribe, this bogus number breaks down into 12 murders and 13 manslaughters from the likes of vehicular homicide. Focusing on the 12 murders per day, King gets that figure by imagining that illegal immigrants have the same criminal profile as the average American and multiplying the 28% incarceration rate of immigrants (not necessarily illegal) in federal prison (not state) by the number of murders per year (16,000).
Let's try to fix the statistic.
First, the proportion of inmates -- federal, state and local -- who are immigrants is 6.4%, not 28%. A
helpful GAO report on actual illegal immigrants in federal and state prison gives us some other numbers: 12% of illegal immigrants in prison committed violent crimes, and 7% of the violent crimes they committed were murder. One more piece of the puzzle can be found from a BLS
summary, which tells us that 10% of all federal inmates and 49% of all state inmates are in for violent crimes. Since
8% of all inmates are in federal prison, that makes the composite rate of violent crime for all inmates 46%.
So 6% of inmates are alien, both illegal and legal, and they commit violent crimes at a quarter the rate of the average inmate.
Therefore, instead of multiplying 16,000 murders by 28% as Rep. King did, we should be multiplying it by 6% and then by 27%. That yields a daily rate of murders by aliens -- both legal and illegal -- of 0.7 Americans -- both citizen and alien -- a day. One would think that the deaths by DUI and the like should be similarly repaired.
One can conclude that there just might be one "American" killed per day by illegal immigrants. I still have my suspicions, however: I would think that -- just as with any other localized cohort you could identify -- they are far more likely to kill each other both intentionally and accidentally than kill those outside their cohort.
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