FAIR:
E-Verify Improves Performance and Limits Employer Discrimination, Report Shows

This week, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Westat, Inc., a research group hired by the federal government, released a report showing that the E-Verify program has made significant gains in performance since the late 1990s. Both employer use and employer satisfaction with use of the E-Verify program have increased, while the costs to employers of using E-Verify have decreased significantly. Importantly, Westat also found that use of the E-Verify program reduced employer discrimination because employers showed an increased willingness to hire those who were or appeared foreign-born when assured that the E-Verify system would sort out anyone who was unauthorized to work. (Findings of the Web Basic Pilot Executive Summary, released November 27, 2007).

Despite the strong findings that the E-Verify program is working, one area in which the program showed some weakness was in processing information for naturalized citizens. The reason is that when these aliens were naturalized, USCIS ceased to maintain work authorization data for them. At the same time, however, the Social Security Administration failed to update its records with regard to the new citizens, leaving them without a record to support their claims of work eligibility. Importantly, the report indicates that these oversights were usually resolved and can be improved with better information-sharing between the Social Security Administration and USCIS.

Overall, as the Westat and other reports show, E-Verify has been a successful method of screening out illegal workers and shows progress for even greater improvement. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reports that for 98% of the workers who are actually authorized to work in the U.S., the system returns an instant "green light." (See DHS Leadership Journal, November 29, 2007.) In a 2006 report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that cases referred for secondary verification are typically resolved within 24 hours, but a small number of cases take longer, sometimes up to 2 weeks, generally due to delays in entry of data. (GAO-06-895T). Unfortunately despite this success rate, only a small proportion of employers -- approximately 24,000 -- currently use the E-Verify program.