Thread: More Puget Sound-area employers using E-Verify

More Puget Sound-area employers checking if workers are legal

Employers in Washington and across the country are embracing a controversial Internet-based hiring tool that can help them avoid trouble in an immigration raid.

By Lornet Turnbull

Seattle Times staff reporter

At Wren Construction in Everett, Annemarie Montera runs the names of all new hires through a federal verification system in an effort to weed out illegal immigrants.

She's among a growing number of employers here and across the country embracing E-Verify, a once-obscure and controversial Internet-based hiring tool run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration that's been getting increasing attention.

In the last year, employer use of the program — now free and voluntary — has more than doubled nationwide and in Washington state, where users include Seattle law firms, the Salvation Army and even a Kirkland homeowner who signed up for the service when he was hiring a caregiver for his wife.

That growth came even before the Obama administration signaled its intention to focus more on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants — a shift in enforcement that could lead to the program's expansion.

Montera said she began using E-Verify after seeing it on CNN.

"Being in the construction industry, we know there's a greater likelihood to encounter workers who are not here legally," she said. "I'm a bleeding-heart Democrat, but when it comes to this, we want to make sure we're doing the right thing."

But along with momentum have come some setbacks.

In the recently approved $780 billion economic-stimulus package, Democratic leadership in Congress stripped a measure requiring employers who receive stimulus money to use E-Verify to ensure they hire only legal U.S. workers.

The program could go a long way toward ensuring illegal immigrants are not hired for stimulus jobs, according to recent studies by two conservative groups — the Center for Immigration Studies and the Heritage Foundation. They estimate that without such controls, illegal immigrants could take up to 300,000 of the estimated 2 million construction jobs the stimulus money is predicted to create.

It's an assertion vehemently disputed by immigrant-advocate groups, which said there's no way to know how many low-skill jobs will be created, much less how many might be filled by undocumented workers.

Further, they say E-Verify is rife with errors and will lead to discrimination against legal workers perceived as being illegal. Homeland Security states that although it has a 99.6 percent accuracy rate, the program does make errors.

Launched in 1997

E-Verify was launched as a pilot in 1997 to allow employers to compare information from employment forms called I-9s against millions of records in Social Security and immigration databases — getting results back in seconds.

Participation nationally has been expanding at a rate of about 1,000 new employers a week over the last year, said Sharon Rummery, spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which operates the program. Use doubled in Washington state over the last year, to 1,343 employers.

In a rare role, the federal government has been heavily promoting E-Verify in a media campaign. And chambers of commerce, corporate attorneys and human-resource organizations have been advising employers about the program.

In this state, a group called Respect Washington has begun collecting signatures in the hopes of placing an issue on the November ballot requiring all state employers to use it.

For now, some employers sign up because their attorneys tell them to. Others enroll after being subjected to a work-site raid. Still others have more specific needs.

Tumwater School District, for example, started using the program last spring after it hired an employee who was unable to supply a Social Security card.

Montera, of Wren Construction, said she became concerned about hiring illegal immigrants when a former employee called to request a new W-2 with a Social Security number different from the one he had used when he worked there.

"We figured he was either using someone else's number or was now trying to get a new one," Montera said.

Michael Derning, of Kirkland, said he signed up for E-Verify because in the past he'd had trouble with home-care workers he'd hired to help him care for his wife, who is a quadriplegic.

"I wanted to know whom I was hiring," he said.

Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... fy15m.html

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