A number of states have taken the route of Illinois and ruled it illegal for employers to use E-Verify to check employees residency status. Chertoff has chosen Illinois as his first target... the state is being sued for standing up to the DHS E-Verify system that has a 50% error rate.
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llinois sued by U.S. over worker law
Measure overrules immigration checks
By Frank James | Washington Bureau
Chicago Tribune
September 25, 2007
WASHINGTON - Department of Homeland Security officials, saying that Illinois is complicating their efforts to reduce illegal immigration, have sued the state to overturn an Illinois law that virtually blocks employers from taking part in a program designed to verify whether new employees are legally entitled to work in the U.S.
"The state of Illinois has now made it illegal to comply with federal law," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in an interview. "That's not acceptable as a matter of the Constitution, and it's not acceptable as a matter of our discharging our federal obligation to enforce the immigration laws."
..."The Internet-based program has a less than 50 percent accuracy rate and takes 10 days to get results," she said. "Lawmakers in Illinois felt that's too long and leaves too much room for error."
The federal government sees the Illinois law as a violation of the Constitution's supremacy clause, which generally elevates federal law over state law.
"What we can't do when we pass a federal law is have the states decide they want to modify that law," said Chertoff, a former federal judge.
But Crystal Williams, deputy director for programs at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the U.S. is being selective in its efforts.
She noted that a number of states have passed laws with provisions aimed at illegal immigrants but federal officials have not filed suit on what she called "clearly violations of the supremacy clause."
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5 comments:
Hi, the information on your blog is beyond inaccurate. The E-Verify system relies on the SSA database, which has between a 5% and 9% error rate. There are two studies that have been conducted on the program. If it was a 50% error rate, the DHS would have never tried to mandate its usage because businesses would have balked. Also, Illinois is, so far, the only state to prohibit the use of E-Verify outright!
Not having access to the specific Chicago Tribune article I quoted, I cannot respond to what you say about the 50% error rate. I will check on it however.
In the meantime, here is a quote from the April 24, 2007 hearing of OF THE IMMIGRATION, CITIZENSHIP, REFUGEES, BORDER SECURITY AND INTERNATIONAL LAW SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE:
by Marc Rosenblum, the Robert Dupuy Professor of Pan-American Studies
and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Orleans as well as a Fellow
at the Migration Policy Institute.
"The Basic Pilot was conceptualized in part to address this problem by eliminating the need for subjective employer judgment, but Basic Pilot database errors are surprisingly widespread, we've talked a little bit about this. They exist on a scale that would affect hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of workers in a universal system. These errors demand our attention because the logic of electronic verification runs counter to the traditional principle of presumed innocence. Under Basic Pilot, all job applicants are presumed unauthorized until proven otherwise. So the burden is on the U.S. citizen or another legal worker to correct database errors, often after considerable time and expense, or lose their job.
A second problem is that these false negatives disproportionately affect persons born outside the United States so that our overall employment verification system becomes a de facto source of employment discrimination. Legal workers who look or sound foreign born are more likely to fail an employer's eyeball test or to be subject to additional scrutiny in the context of ambiguous verification procedures. Faced with these doubts, some employers refuse to hire such job applicants as a function of their appearance, and other employers hire questionable job applicants, but pass along the risks of doing so in the form of lower wages. A well-functioning electronic eligibility verification system could ameliorate this problem, but the Basic Pilot exacerbates the problem because database errors in Basic Pilot are far more likely to affect naturalized citizens and legal immigrants than native-born citizens."
Here is a Times article from last year stating the SSA database has a 4.1% error rate. This may be a conservative estimate, but it is not expected to be much higher:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/opinion/13mon2.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fI%2fIllegal%20Aliens&oref=slogin
On Illinois, the bill it passed (it's now being sued by the DHS) says the E-Verify system can only be used when the SSA database reaches 99% accuracy.
The main source for all E-Verify inquiries is the SSA database. Here is the link to the report, stating the 4.1% error rate:
http://www.ssa.gov/oig/ADOBEPDF/A-08-06-26100.pdf.
There are specific issues that arise from even a 4.1% error rate, but the debate has to begin with the facts.
Alright - here is the independent study done by Westat. They did 1.2 million inquiries and E-Verify gave automatic work-authorization to 91% of individuals. Of those who recieved "tentative non-confirmation," .7% of cases of US-born citizens were errorneous; 10% of foreign-born workers were erroneous. This puts error around 15% (account for error of the study).
http://www.nilc.org/immsemplymnt/ircaempverif/westatinterimreport_webbasicpilot_2006-12.pdf
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