Questions for Secretary Napolitano: E-Verify
Posted April 23rd, 2009 at 2.03pm in Protect America.
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is tentatively scheduled to testify before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee about DHS immigration enforcement policies on May 6, 2009. Given Secretary Napolitano’s novel interpretations of federal law, the Heritage Foundation will be posting a series of questions (and suggested answers) for the Secretary.
Questions for Napolitano # 2: Does the Obama Administration unequivocally support E-Verify and IMAGE?
E-Verify allows employers to confirm an employee’s ability to legally work in the United States. An employer enters information provided by a prospective employee (from the I-9 form) into an online portal. The system then compares that data to information in Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases. It then issues either a confirmation or a non-confirmation. Non-confirmations can be resolved if an employee can later prove that there was a discrepancy in the system. If it is not resolved, a final non-confirmation is issued and the employer is not allowed to hire the worker.
E-Verify has been a success. More than 80,000 employers participate in E-Verify, and the system has confirmed the identity of over 5.3 million workers. The program has been a success because it helps employers enforce immigration laws in a cheap and user-friendly fashion. For example, the software is free and requires very basic information—information already found on the I-9. Knowing beforehand that an employee can legally work also minimizes the cost of having to hire new employees later. And with an error rate of fewer than 4 percent, employers can comfortably rely on the program.
IMAGE also is a voluntary program for companies that wish to verify that their employees can legally work in the United States. For a company to be IMAGE-certified, it must receive training from ICE on hiring procedures, detecting fraudulent documents, and using E-Verify. In addition, companies must also undergo an I-9 audit and check the legitimacy of existing employees’ Social Security numbers. The program currently has 27 full members.
Rather than continue the uncertainty of whether E-Verify will be a permanent tool of the federal government, the Obama Administration fully supports permanent authorization and funding the use of and expansion of E-Verify and equally supports the IMAGE program.
For more information on Heritage’s work on E-Verify please see Jena Baker McNeill and Matt Mayer’s Webmemo, Don’t Let E-Verify Perish in the Next Congress.
Also see Question 1: The Future of State and Local Immigration Enforcement
- Author: Jena McNeill
- Interact: Sphere
- Share This
April 23, 2009 Brittancus writes:
If America is expected to sustaining its living standards, we must start to conserve our environment and address the use of oil, water and energy. In these current decades we have all observed the deterioration of our highways, infrastructure with clogged traffic lanes that never seem to abate? The continuous requisite for land to build homes, and stretching, concrete pavement that once was farmland. Border states where water supplies are being rationed, because of years of drought. The desperate need for refineries, because of constant production, cannot keep up with demand. Our ailing national electrical grid that is unable to keep up with requirements, owing to the millions of illegal people who slip across our uneasy border and need services. America is growing smaller each day, just like the Amazon rain forests. We are daily encroaching on the wild animals of our lands, who we now find foraging for food in community suburbs–that was once a wilderness. Our President should not be contemplating Amnesty for an unknown number of illegal immigrants. Such would be the forthcoming harbinger of Overpopulation for future generations. According to the Census Bureau with the current immigration level our population will touch close to a half a billion by 2050.
More than 65 percent of that growth can be attributed to our current immigration rate and irrational polices. Without changing the direction of our current immigration policies, our population by the year 2100 and 2120 will attain the one billion mark. Is this what we want for our own?
If President Obama introduces a new Immigration policy, this would be a disaster for the new generations of our children? We already settle over 1.5 million new legal immigrants each year in this nation. This is more people than any other country in the world? What we need is an amendment to the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act. This would allow highly professional and skilled people, who would contribute in Engineering, Computer and Science technologies. Giving Potential legal newcomers that has something special to offer the American workplace, including education and other layers of future industry. We already have millions of low skilled, many uneducated American workers who remain jobless in this economic morass. If our politicians will restore funding for E-Verify now before it terminates. We can revise it, modify and append to its function, in removing foreign workers from the workplace. As illegal immigrants start their movement from our nation, wages, benefits should slowly start to rise, as employers will have no choice but to hire American workers, instead of cheap labor from foreign lands.