Thread: Courthouse contractors will get immigration check

Courthouse contractors will get immigration check

Posted: Wednesday, May 4, 2011 2:44 pm
Updated: 2:56 pm, Wed May 4, 2011.
by JAMES McGINNIS

All the men and women working to build new county courthouse in Doylestown will be legal residents of the United States, under a measure adopted Wednesday.

The county commissioners unanimously passed a resolution requiring the thousands of workers expected on the job site to be certified through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify program.

Commissioner Diane Marseglia first pitched the idea in February. Marseglia said she didn't want illegal immigrants hired for the $84 million project that's financed through county tax dollars.

There were an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. in 2009, and an estimated 7.8 million of those were in the labor force, according to the Pew Research Center, a non-profit non-partisan research group.

Construction of the eight-story justice center is slated to begin later this month.

Under the protocol adopted during the commissioners' meeting, contractors must supply the county with all the necessary E-Verify documentation. At all times, workers will be required to wear ID badges and hardhat stickers supplied by the county, said Jerry Anderson, county operations director.

"If we spot someone who is not E-Verified, we would ask them to leave the job site, and then contact the contractor and tell them tell them to fix it," said Anderson. "If they won't fix it, then we would just refuse to pay them and you can't have much more clout than that."

E-Verify is a free, Internet-based system that allows employers to confirm that their workers aren't illegal immigrants. E-Verify is mandatory for employers working on most federal government contracts. Pennsylvania has no such requirement.

For several years, local state Rep. John Galloway, D-140, has been fighting to make E-Verify mandatory for all state government contracts. The state House passed Galloway's E-Verify bill last year but the Senate failed to act on it.

Critics of the program, among them the American Civil Liberties Union, argue that the system contains errors which prevented legal immigrants from being able to work.

A December 2010 report by the federal Government Accounting Office found that E-Verify was able to immediately confirm the eligibility of about 97 percent of legal workers as compared to 92 percent in 2006.

However, the GAO concluded that "errors persist" largely because a worker's name was misspelled by the employer during the verification process.

Since January, E-Verify bills have been introduced into the state House and Senate by Galloway and other lawmakers.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/my_town/doyl ... f6878.html

However, the GAO concluded that "errors persist" largely because a worker's name was misspelled by the employer during the verification process.

Then it's up to the worker to correct that misspelling, isn't it?

GO COMMISHES!!!!