Screening and Enforcement: A Snapshot of Federal Action on Immigration

By Steven Gray Thursday, July 7, 2011

In the coming days, the House Judiciary Committee is expected to debate a bill introduced by its chairman, Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, that would require all businesses to use a federal electronic system to verify their employees’ citizenship status. The new measure is the most promising attempt in the current Congress to deal with the vexing matter of immigration, which lately has been tackled most aggressively by the states.

The federal system, known as E-Verify, enjoys the support of some Democrats, including the Obama Administration, and certain corporate business interests. Here’s the gist of how it works: A business puts a current or prospective employee’s social security number, or alien identification number, into an online federal database, which quickly checks the individual’s citizenship status. Businesses with more than 500 employees would have to begin using E-Verify within a year of the law’s enactment, and all businesses, regardless of size, would have to sign up within two years. Already, more than a quarter-million U.S. businesses use E-Verify – in part, to get ahead of the Obama Administration’s heightened prosecution of businesses suspected of hiring undocumented workers. New federal employees and certain government contractors are already required to enter the E-Verify system. And new immigration laws in five states, including South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, now require businesses to use the system.

Smith has suggested making E-Verify mandatory since the system was launched in the mid-1990s, during one of the last major immigration reform efforts. Now, barely a year after joining the government-cutting Tea Party Caucus, he is positioning the bill as a “jobs creator,â€