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Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Hearing on E-Verify, SAVE Act
Forcing companies to use a government system to verify the legal status of workers would cause thousands of citizens and legal residents to be initially rejected for work and cripple the Social Security Administration, critics told Congress Tuesday.
The system, known as E-Verify, is currently voluntary, but several proposals in Congress — including an immigration enforcement measure known as the SAVE Act — would make it mandatory.
John Trasvina, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that the E-Verify system relies on faulty Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of Homeland Security databases and would therefore create an official “no-work” list requiring millions of U.S. citizens and legal workers to bear the burden of proving their legal status.
“Forcing a deeply flawed system upon an unstable economy is not the answer,” he told the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security.
The panel’s chairman, Rep. Michael McNulty, D-N.Y., said he was concerned that SSA offices could be overwhelmed with a “massive new workload” as U.S. citizens and other authorized workers try to correct their information.
Rep. Heath Shuler, a North Carolina Democrat who authored the SAVE Act, said that targeting employers is the key to solving the problem of illegal immigration and that the system works.
E-Verify is free, easy-to-use, and allows participants to successfully match 93 percent of new hires to government databases in less than 5 seconds, Shuler said.
Of the remaining 7 percent, the vast majority do not contest the result, he added.
Shuler noted that every congressional staffer and employee of a federal agency has passed through the E-Verify system over the past decade.
“I have the utmost confidence in this program,” he said.
