Thread: Hiring a legal workforce: Does the E-Verify program work?

Hiring a legal workforce: Does the E-Verify program work?
By Lynda Waddington 8/14/08 9:11 AM

Two out of the three test balloons floated 11 years ago by the Clinton Administration and Congress as possible ways to lessen the nation’s illegal immigration problem popped quickly. A third, known since 2007 as E-Verify, continues to float around the nation. While both private and government organizations have been critical of the tool, new voices have begun to emerge to question not only the effectiveness but the politics behind its continuance.

As the nation considers and lawmakers decide if the E-Verify program, scheduled for reauthorization this November, is worth saving, eyes are turning to Iowa, a state that has weathered two unprecedented immigration raids in as many years.

A Tale of Two Meatpackers

It’s been relatively easy for advocates of immigration crackdown to point fingers at Postville’s kosher meatpacking plant Agriprocessors. Despite numerous written warnings from the Social Security Administration about submitted employee data not matching federal database information, company officials — like thousands of others across the U.S. — never opted to use the E-Verify program. Since making national headlines as the site of the nation’s largest single-location immigration raid on May 12, the company has since hired a staffing company that uses the online federal system to check workers’ eligibility.

Finger pointing at the management of Swift & Co., a meatpacking plant that operates in Iowa and other states, hasn’t been as clear cut.

On Dec. 12, 2006, in an event dubbed Operation Wagon Train, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Swift plants in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Utah. A total of 1,282 workers were detained on immigration and criminal charges. Roughly 100 of those detained were workers at Swift’s Marshalltown plant. It remains the largest multiple work site sweep in ICE’s history and caught the meatpacker, one of a handful of companies that voluntarily used E-Verify to authorize workers, completely off guard.

On March 1, 2006, ICE presented a subpoena at the Marshalltown plant for the company’s I-9 employment verification forms. It wasn’t an usual request and, as such, did not alert plant management of the already ongoing investigation and soon to be impending raid. The search warrant filed by ICE in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Iowa indicates that the agency believed 664 workers were illegal immigrants who had assumed the identities of U.S. citizens and thus thwarted the E-Verify system.

During the course of both investigations, ICE sent an undercover agent into the plants. On Aug. 22, 2006 the undercover agent at Swift recorded Braulio Pereyra-Gabino telling new employees in Spanish how to protect assumed identities. On Jan. 8 the undercover agent at Agriprocessors recorded a female human resources employee (unnamed in the search warrant) speaking in Spanish to a group of newly hired employees and joking about how the individuals should mark their employment verification forms. Pereyra-Gabino was convicted in May of harboring illegal aliens and sentenced last week to one year and one day in prison and a $2,000 fine. He was aquitted of false representation of a Social Security number and aggravated identity theft. At his trial it was revealed that one of the detained workers testified for the prosecution that she taped a conversation in which Pereyra-Gabino, knowing she was undocumented, told her how to obtain papers so she could work at Swift.

Another employee at Swift — Christopher Lamb, an assistant human resources manager — was also charged with harboring illegal aliens after a detainee who used a stolen identity agreed to cooperate with the ICE investigation. Alejandro Vazquez-Avina, according to court documents, had worked at the Marshalltown plant at various times since 2002. Since he had known Lamb for a number of years, Vazquez-Avina agreed to wear a wire and approach Lamb about once again working at Swift. Lamb did not directly hire Vazquez-Avina, but did offer advice as to how the man should react when he applied for employment at the plant. Lamb entered a guilty plea and was sentenced in March to 12 months probation.

Two lower-level members of management at Agriprocessors remain the only plant supervisors that have been charged with crimes in conjunction with the immigration raid there. Martin De La Rosa-Loera and Juan Carlos Guerrero-Espinoza are both charged with aiding and abetting the possession and use of fraudulent identity documents and encouraging aliens to illegally reside in the U.S. Both have entered pleas of not guilty and are now remanded until their scheduled September trial dates.

Although court documents indicate that the raid on Agriprocessors resulted in the discovery of dozens of fraudulent permanent alien resident cards from the company’s human resources department, to date, no member of the Agriprocessors’ human resources department has been charged.

You’re Either With Us Or Against Us

Officials with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) seemed to be little taken aback by a recent blog posting by DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker. In the post, dated July 11, Baker lashed out at the professional organization for human resource executives.

…I suppose corporate hiring is easier if you can hire illegal workers, so perhaps I shouldn’t be suprised that SHRM want to kill a program that makes it harder to hire illegal workers.

SHRM says it doesn’t want to kill E-Verify. SHRM says it wants to replace E-Verify with a new, better program to prevent illegal hiring. A closer look shows that the SHRM alternative is doomed to fail — and will take years to do so. So, for a decade, while the SHRM alternative is failing, no one will have a good tool to actually prevent illegal hires. Which may be precisely what SHRM wants.

China Miner Gorman, acting president and chief executive officer for SHRM, wasted little time firing off a letter to Michael Chertoff, director of the Department of Homeland Security and Baker’s boss.

…DHS is attempting to discredit SHRM by asserting that our support for the New Employee Verification Act (NEVA) and our work with the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX), are nothing more than an elaborate plan to kill employment verification altogether. … SHRM and its members are on the front lines of employment verification every day. We know what works and what doesn’t — and E-Verify doesn’t work. E-Verify’s effectiveness has been called into question by a variety of organizations, businesses, the Government Accountability Office, Members of Congress and state governments. … DHS has chosen to use Executive Orders and legal maneuvers to force participation in E-Verify, while ignoring requests to discuss our concerns or modify its plans in any way.

Gorman goes on to document two 2007 requests by “Five of the nation’s leading human resources organizationsâ€

[quote]
“Currently, there is no way for an employer to verify that a person showing certain forms of identification are there person that they are claiming to be,â€