Thread: Illegal Workers Slip by System

* FEBRUARY 25, 2010

Illegal Workers Slip by System
Homeland Security Program Seen Failing to Catch Half of Unauthorized Hires
* Comments - 8

By LOUISE RADNOFSKY and MIRIAM JORDAN

The Department of Homeland Security's controversial and much-touted E-Verify program might be failing to detect one out of two illegal workers whose employment authorizations are screened, outside consultants have told the agency.

Tens of thousands of companies participate in E-Verify, either voluntarily or as a condition of doing business with the government.

The Internet-based program checks information provided by new hires against Social Security Administration and Homeland Security databases to confirm they are U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents of the country.

An evaluation of E-Verify carried out for DHS by research group Westat found the program couldn't confirm whether information workers were presenting was their own, and, as a result, "many unauthorized workers obtain employment by committing identity fraud that cannot be detected by E-Verify," Westat told the department. Westat put the "inaccuracy rate for unauthorized workers" at about 54%.

E-Verify has previously faced criticism for failing to authorize individuals who are permitted to work in the U.S.

A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a unit of DHS, said the department already was working on improvements to the program, including adding more databases and a photo screening tool, and setting up a monitoring and compliance branch to detect identity fraud.



"The Westat report shows that E-Verify's accuracy continues to improve, with the vast majority of all cases automatically found to be work-authorized," said CIS deputy press secretary Bill Wright. The evaluation found that, overall, E-Verify accurately screened 96% of workers, correctly identifying 93.1% of cases as people allowed to work in the U.S. and 2.9% as unauthorized. Some 3.3% of cases were illegal workers mistaken for legal workers, and 0.7% were individuals who could work in the U.S. but were not initially identified that way.

Westat, of Rockville, Md., regularly advises the federal government. The company didn't respond to a request for comment.

The research company submitted its report in December. It was posted on the Web site of Citizenship and Immigration Services but has received little public attention.

All federal contractors are required to enroll in E-Verify within 30 days of being awarded a government contract. At least 10 states use the system to check the work-eligibility of state workers. Some states, like Arizona and Mississippi, require all employers to use E-Verify, regardless of whether they are state contractors.

Congressional Republicans are pushing to expand the program and for it to be included in federal jobs-creation proposals.

E-Verify was stepped up under former President George W. Bush, and the administration of President Barack Obama has maintained support for the program, taking a tough immigration-enforcement stance designed in part to win support for a broader campaign to create a path to legal residency and citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.

http://online.wsj.com

I have always heard that E-Verify will not detect someone using a valid SS number. Illegals say that will cause more American citizens to be victims of ID THEFT since valid numbers are required.
E-Verify needs to add another verification point that is not available on most records, like city of birth, or fingerprints.

How about we demand ID THEFT be prosecuted as a FELONY? These illegal workers are hardly ever charged with ID theft, even when they cause tremendous damage to the victim. Is there a victims rights group for victims of ID THEFT?
The idea that legal workers should BUY ID THEFT PROTECTION to protect themselves is another indication of our governments failure to protect its citizens.

Related:
The Truth About the Westat Report on E-Verify (02/25/10)
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-189423.html

E-Verify accurately screened 96% of workers, correctly identifying 93.1% of cases as people allowed to work in the U.S. and 2.9% as unauthorized. Some 3.3% of cases were illegal workers mistaken for legal workers, and 0.7% were individuals who could work in the U.S. but were not initially identified that way.

Only 0.7% were Americans temporarily kept from working, while 3.3% were illegals allowed to work. The error rate is 5 to 1 in the illegals favor! Yet the pro illegal groups complain about this error rate, which is 5 to 1 in their favor? Obviously they simply hate anything that keeps illegals from working or living in the USA.

Migrants trick E-Verify
Employee-screening system often thwarted by stolen IDs

by Daniel González - Feb. 26, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

Two years after Arizona began requiring all employers to use a federal online program to ensure a legal workforce, a new study indicates that illegal workers are slipping through the system more than half of the time by using stolen identities.

Fifty-four percent of the illegal workers whose names were run through the program nationwide were wrongly found to be authorized to work, according to the report by Westat, a Maryland research company hired by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to evaluate the system, known as E-Verify.

The system's high inaccuracy rate for illegal workers using stolen identities has greatly alarmed business groups in Arizona.

The state's 2008 employer-sanctions law mandates that employers use E-Verify and gives authorities the power to close down businesses found to be knowingly hiring illegal workers.

"Arizona employers are relying when they sign up for E-Verify that this is an accurate program," said Glenn Hamer, president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "If the system is busted, it's obviously unfair to punish employers."

In 2008, Arizona became the first state in the nation to require all employers to use E-Verify. Since then, more than 33,000 Arizona businesses have signed up for the program, the highest number of any state, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees E-Verify.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has raided 30 businesses under the employer-sanctions law and has arrested hundreds of workers accused of using forgery, fraud and identity theft to gain employment illegally.

In November, County Attorney Andrew Thomas also filed a complaint against a custom-cabinet and -furniture business, the Scottsdale Art Factory.

And, in December, Thomas announced sanctions against a water park, but the sanctions never took effect because the park closed after it was raided. The water park has since reopened under new management.

State Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, who co-sponsored Arizona's sanctions law, said he is disappointed E-Verify has such a high inaccuracy rate for illegal workers, but he defended the program.

"It's disappointing to know that the best tool available is not that effective, but it's better than no tool," he said.

"It also shows the need to improve the system," either through enhancing photo checks or introducing biometric checks, such as fingerprint scanning.

Arizona's sanctions law spurred other states to pass similar laws as part of an effort to crack down on illegal immigration. Eleven other states now require at least some, if not all, businesses to use E-Verify.

The program is voluntary in other states. A total of 188,358 businesses out of about 7 million employers have signed up to use E-Verify nationwide. However, some members of Congress are pushing to make E-Verify mandatory nationwide.

E-Verify allows employers to use an online program to run a worker's information against Homeland Security and Social Security databases to check whether the person is authorized to work in the U.S.

The Westat report, which studied data from September 2007 to June 2008, found that 93 percent of the workers checked by employers were accurately deemed authorized to work. The system wrongly flagged less than 1 percent of legal workers as being unauthorized.

About 6 percent of the people run through the system should not have been authorized to work, the report said, but nearly 54 percent of them were wrongly deemed authorized. That 54 percent amounts to about 3.3 percent of the total workers run through the system.

The accuracy checks are estimates based on federal records and interviews with employers, workers and federal staff.

Last fiscal year, about 8.5 million queries were run through the system.

Bill Wright, a spokesman for the CIS in Washington, said the Westat report shows that overall, E-Verify is effective at preventing illegal immigrants from getting jobs, but he acknowledged the system has problems screening out those using stolen identities.

"I don't mean to trivialize it. Certainly, it's an issue," he said.

The government recently added a tool aimed at cutting down on the number of illegal workers who slip through E-Verify using stolen identities by letting employers match photos on green cards against photos in government immigration databases, he said.

The government also wants to work out agreements with states that incorporate driver's-license databases into the E-Verify system to further screen out illegal workers using stolen identities.

Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a research group in Washington, D.C., said the fact that 54 percent of illegal workers are slipping through E-Verify shows that the program is not an adequate tool.

"That's a pretty bad success rate," he said. "The bottom line is we can't expect E-Verify to solve the problem by itself."

Jim Harper, director of information-policy studies at the Cato Institute, said the study shows E-Verify is not only ineffective but that the program likely has spurred more illegal immigrants to use stolen identities to circumvent the system.

"The chances are very strong that is what happened," Harper said. The institute is a libertarian group in Washington, D.C., that favors increases in legal immigration over enforcement measures to solve illegal immigration.

In the past, illegal immigrants mostly used fake documents with invented Social Security numbers to get jobs. But recently, law-enforcement officials in Arizona have seen an increase in identity theft involving Social Security numbers and other information belonging to real people.

"We've probably arrested 30 individuals (since November) that all had to do with identity theft involving real (Social Security numbers)," said David Lugo, a detective who investigates document fraud for the Arizona Department of Transportation.

The increase in identity theft comes as the state's ability to investigate such crimes has been diminished. In November, the Arizona Fraudulent Identification Task Force made up of investigators from several law-enforcement agencies was eliminated due to budget cuts, said Lugo, a former member.

www.azcentral.com

Added to Homepage with amended title:
http://www.alipac.us/article-4967--0-0.html

This shows that we must improve E-Verify. All these open borders group that criticize E-Verify make me laugh. The fact remains that even if it was 100% effective, they would still criticize it because they want no enforcement.

Related:
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National Review Online
the corner
Thursday, February 25, 2010

The E-Verify Glass Is Half Full [Mark Krikorian]

An evaluation of the E-Verify program conducted about two years ago has just been released. (The 338-page pdf is here.) It estimates, among other things, that about half of illegal aliens who were screened between April and June 2008 managed to foil the system and get approved for employment, and opponents of immigration enforcement are tickled pink. Chuck Schumer, who is taking the lead on amnesty, said, "This is a wake-up call to anyone who thinks E-Verify is an effective remedy to stop the hiring of illegal immigrants." Likewise, former Kennedy staffer Marc Rosenblum said, "Clearly it means it's not doing its No. 1 job well enough."

These complaints from the pro-amnesty folks are kind of funny, considering that they've spent the past several years complaining in the press and in lawsuits that the databases are so corrupted that legions of legal workers across this great land were unjustly being denied work. Since that's just not happening, their new argument has to be that too many illegal aliens are being approved — as though they really mind that.

Nevertheless, it's certainly true that E-Verify isn't tight enough yet, but in a glass-half-full sense, this isn't really bad news. After all, in the old paper-based system (still used for most hires), 100 percent of illegal aliens are approved, so this is real progress. What's more, we know perfectly well what the problems are, and they don't have much to with with the E-Verify system itself.

The core problem is identity theft — multiple uses of the same combination of name/birthdate/Social Security Number. (E-Verify has always been very effective at catching the most common form of identity fraud, which involves illegal using their own names paired with a stolen or made-up SSNs.) This was highlighted as a challenge at least as far back as 1994, when Barbara Jordan's Commission on Immigration Reform issued its initial report.

This new report finds that only 9 percent of SSNs used nine times or more between 2004 and 2008 were kicked out by the system as illegal aliens; obviously, almost all of them were being misused by illegal aliens. As the authors noted, "It does not seem plausible to the evaluation team that only 9 percent of the cases in which workers used SSNs or A-numbers on the Transaction Database nine or more times were for unauthorized workers." This is why photos from green cards and Employment Authorization Documents now pop up when someone presents one of those (passport pics are coming online soon), and also why states need to provide driver's license photos when those documents are used (some states are resisting, even though they share with each other). In other words, E-Verify needs a robust ID system underlying it, which is why Congress passed the REAL ID Act, which some states and open-borders interests are still resisting.

Finally, the report notes that "mandating the use of E-Verify is expected to make the Program more effective in preventing unauthorized employment." Yes, it is. And the best example of such a mandate is Arizona, but its experience with the program was not assessed in this report; "The evaluation team did not have adequate data for estimating the impact of E-Verify on unauthorized employment in Arizona, the only state that has implemented E-Verify for all employers."

02/25 05:08 PM

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/? ... YyOWM5ZWU=

They present this article like it's such electrifying news. But this is just common knowledge. E-Verify usually cannot detect when whole identities are stolen. But the article highlights that identity theft has become widespread and magnified. Perhaps this is why identity protection companies, such as LifeLock, are doing well in these hard economic times.

The Obama Administration is trying to take-over the whole Healthcare industry, and make it Government-run. Why does he not, instead, try for a take-over of these new identity protection services? It seems to me that this is something our Government really should be doing, to help provide for the safety and prosperity of Americans.

The increase in identity theft comes as the state's ability to investigate such crimes has been diminished. In November, the Arizona Fraudulent Identification Task Force made up of investigators from several law-enforcement agencies was eliminated due to budget cuts, said Lugo, a former member.

Herein lies another problem. Any and all successes in combating identity theft is mysteriously eliminated due to "budget cuts".

What? Does the state only go after profitable to arrest criminals?