USA TODAY OPINION
Letters to the editor

Use E-Verify to protect jobs for legal residents

The use of E-Verify to check documents of new hires in the workplace should be made mandatory. As USA TODAY reveals in the article on the takedown of a criminal enterprise providing fake Social Security cards and driver's licenses to illegal immigrants for $150 and $200, it is easy and cheap to buy fake documents and present them with employment verification forms at the time of hire ("Case: ID scam run like cartel," News, Tuesday).

By Steve Helber, AP
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Case of document fraud: John Morton, director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, announces indictments in a document fraud ring with cells in 19 cities and 11 states.

Even though this one particularly violent ring might be dismantled, surely others will replace it to provide the same fraudulent documents. It is appalling that this travesty continues when an extremely accurate, fast and inexpensive system is available to check documents against government databases to verify Social Security numbers.

More and more states are moving to E-Verify, but this common-sense approach should be mandated on the federal level, and the sooner the better to protect jobs for legal residents of this country.

Mary Long; Manchester, Conn.
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ID scams cloud Census data

USA TODAY has been running a series on U.S. population Census data. More often than not, those articles show the number of Hispanics as growing faster than other population groups in the U.S. ("Hispanic responses on race give more exact breakdown," News, Wednesday).

Tuesday's article on the alleged ID scam ring would indicate that some illegal immigrants are counterfeiting U.S. identification documents and selling them to other illegal immigrants.

Now that John Morton of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced indictments concerning those involved, the Census data numbers seem almost ghost-like. Some of those Hispanics will eventually have to return to their native countries.

Joe Bitner; Noblesville, Ind.
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Census choices don't fit
Having filled out the recent Census as a Hispanic male, I can tell you that I question that the results provide "a more exact racial breakdown of the nation's population," as suggested in a recent USA TODAY article.

Most Hispanics had no choice but to select "white" as their race. I am Hispanic with family origins from El Salvador. I called up my local Census office for assistance, and a representative explained there was no better option for me than to choose white.

I was offended by the choices on the form. To me, white doesn't really describe my race at all. In speaking with several other Hispanics, I found that they also ran into the same problem.

Steven Bearer; Pennington, N.J.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/le ... 1_ST_N.htm