Worker verification plan moves ahead; Illegal immigration

The San Francisco Chronicle (California)
July 9, 2009 Thursday
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

The Obama administration withdrew the government's long-stalled effort Wednesday to pressure employers to fire suspected illegal immigrants while moving ahead with an equally controversial plan to require federal contractors to check employees' names against records that are supposed to screen out unauthorized workers.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the screening system, called E-Verify, is more modern and effective than the now-abandoned "no-match" rule that relied on the Social Security database. E-Verify, endorsed by the U.S. Senate later Wednesday, "will create a more reliable and legal workforce," Napolitano said.

But labor unions and immigrants'-rights advocates who have fought the no-match rule in a federal court in San Francisco said the new system suffers from many of the same flaws and could deny employment to hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens and legal residents while encouraging job discrimination.

With E-Verify, "they're using databases that are also riddled with errors and will wind up costing a lot of authorized workers their jobs," said attorney Nora Preciado of the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles.

The no-match rule, proposed by President George W. Bush's administration in 2007, used an existing system in which the government compares Social Security numbers on employees' tax forms with the Social Security database and notifies employers of discrepancies. Under no-match, employers who failed to clear up any such differences within three months would have had to fire the worker or face possible civil fines and criminal prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco blocked the rule from taking effect in October 2007. He said unions and business groups had raised serious questions about whether Congress had authorized the rule.

The Obama administration put the case on hold until Napolitano's announcement Wednesday that she was withdrawing no-match. At the same time, she endorsed a regulation, unveiled by the Bush administration last November, to make the now-voluntary E-Verify program mandatory for all federal contractors, starting Sept. 8.

Employers in the program submit employees' names and numbers to the Social Security database and another archive maintained by the Homeland Security Department, and give employees a limited time to clear up discrepancies or lose their jobs. The regulation would cover all federal contractors and subcontractors, and apply to all newly hired employees as well as employees working on current contracts.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has challenged the regulation in a federal court in Maryland, arguing that the 1996 law that authorized E-Verify specified that it would be voluntary and apply only to newly hired workers.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano backs the screening system.

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