Friday, July 24, 2009

Poll: Will national ID card be needed to ensure a legal workforce?

Letter from Washington: Lawmakers wrestle with what system would be best to weed out illegal employees

Dena Bunis
Washington Bureau Chief
The Orange County Register
dbunis@ocregister.com

Would you be willing to give up some privacy to ensure that there are no illegal immigrants in the country's workplaces?

That may end up being one of the central questions in the debate over comprehensive immigration reform.

Two congressional panels held hearings this week to consider the best way to determine whether the U.S. workforce is legal. In particular, lawmakers were questioning whether the current voluntary government program, E-Verify, is good enough.

E-Verify, which was authored back in 1996 by Rep. Ken Calvert, is by no means a foolproof system.

Calvert, R-Corona, has been pushing for years to make the system permanent but opponents say the databases the web-based program relies on contain too many errors.

Two states – Arizona and Georgia – have passed laws requiring all employers to use the system. And Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced two weeks ago that the Obama administration was going to go ahead with the Bush plan to require all federal contractors to be part of the system.

As of last week, 137,463 employers have enrolled in E-Verify, 10,687 of them in California. The latest numbers available for Orange County date back to January, when there were 467 companies participating.

Federal officials say new companies are coming on line at the rate of 1,000 a week. That number is expected to grow in September, once the federal contractor provision kicks in.

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Would you support a national ID card if it meant a legal workforce?
Yes. With the Internet, privacy is a thing of the past anyway

No. I don't want Big Brother watching

Don't know. Need to hear more about such a proposal.

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Fountain Valley construction contractor Jim Rieff, who has signed up, would like to see all employers use E-Verify.

"I'm totally in favor of it,'' Rieff told me. He's a small business guy and so far has only had to run one employee through E-Verify. He did have a problem that time. In fact it took eight weeks for the employee to be cleared.

Even so, Rieff supports the system because he says there needs to be a way to make sure U.S. citizens aren't pushed out by illegal workers.

Rieff says he knows he has lost some construction bids because competitors hire illegal workers who work for much less.

But immigration advocates and some business groups have pushed back, saying as long as there are errors in the databases used to check a person's Social Security number, the government shouldn't mandate the system for all employers. They say if employers are forced to use the system they may just take the path of least resistance and racially profile workers.

Here's how the system is supposed to work: After an employer offers someone a job, they input the person's Social Security number into the E-Verify system. In more than 96 percent of the cases, within a few seconds the computer tells the employer the number matches the name and all is well. If that doesn't happen, a so-called tentative nonconfirmation comes back and then the employee has to call the Social Security Administration or DHS and find out what's wrong.

Even if this system was 100 percent accurate there is a fundamental flaw in it. It doesn't catch people who have bought or stolen a valid Social Security number.

In 2006, an immigration raid on the Swift meat processing plant in Texas picked up 1,200 illegal workers despite the fact that Swift was enrolled in E-Verify.

Newport Beach immigration lawyer Mitch Wexler says his clients like the E-Verify idea but are skittish about using it because of the errors in the data bases.

Michael Aytes, who runs U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told committee members about the various improvements they are making to combat identity fraud.

DHS has added green card and work permit photos to the system so employers can verify a worker's identity. And they are planning on adding passport photos as well.

But it's estimated that fewer than 10 percent of the public have passports so most workers won't have photos in the system.

Ideally, DHS would like to strike deals with all 50 states to get driver's license photos embedded in E-Verify. But if the reluctance of states to participate in the Real ID program is any indication, those agreements would be hard to come by. (Real ID was a law Congress passed to make driver's licenses more secure; so far it hasn't been implemented)

The concern over identity theft has led some lawmakers – most notably Sen. Chuck Schumer, the new chairman of the immigration subcommittee, to push for an employment verification system that includes some biometric feature.

Biometrics is a fancy word for identification using a picture, fingerprint, or some sort of facial recognition. The technology for these techniques has improved greatly in recent years and while still costly, the price tags have been dropping as this industry becomes more competitive.

But that then leads me back to the initial question. Would Americans push back on having to get what would essentially be a national ID card?

Former INS Commissioner James Ziglar, who has run a company that designs biometric identification systems, told Schumer's subcommittee that more and more Americans are having to use such systems in their workplaces. And Lynden Melmed, an immigration expert who used to advise Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, on immigration issues and was general counsel for USCIS, told the panel that Americans are now more comfortable with the use of technology and might not balk so much at a card-based system.

So maybe the specter of Big Brother Watching won't dominate the debate. We'll see.

Several lawmakers and witnesses at these hearings called an employer verification system the linchpin of a comprehensive immigration reform.

The last time around, in 2006 and 2007, employment verification was listed in every bill but lawmakers never got down to the nitty-gritty of how these systems would be structured.

They're not likely to make that mistake again. This time, at least Schumer, D-N.Y., who will be the bill's architect in the Senate, knows that the public wants confidence that enforcement is front and center of any reform and I'll bet he'll be sure to get agreement on a solid verification system before tackling the more contentious issue of legalizing the undocumented immigrants here now.

We'll be watching.

Contact the writer: (202) 628-6381 or dbunis@ocregister.com

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/syst ... ers-number