Latin American Herald Tribune, March 9, 2010
TUCSON, Arizona – The E-Verify program to verify the immigration status of employees has made a number of mistakes, according to its critics, and so lawmakers are pushing for approval of a bill to apply the law without hurting workers.

The bill, sponsored by a bipartisan group headed by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) seeks to verify not only the eligibility to work of potential employees but also their identities.

“I’m very concerned about the cases we’ve had of citizens who have been disqualified and those of undocumented people with fake documents who have been certified to work with E-Verify,” Giffords told Efe.

The New Employee Verification Act was presented by Giffords with the support of Texas Republican Sam Johnson for the first time two years ago, but it has been generating interest again after a report that emerged last month revealing serious failures of E-Verify in cases of identity theft.

“Arizona was the first state in the country to require all employers to use the E-Verify program to verify the immigration status of their workers,” said Giffords, who added that she constantly receives complaints from employers who say that the current system has many problems.

“Some people hear that E-Verify only has a (small) error percentage, but if we’re talking of implementing it in an obligatory manner on the national level, we would be talking about millions of workers who could be negatively impacted,” she said.

NEVA is seeking to do away with one of the weak points of E-Verify, which is the identity theft committed by certain undocumented immigrants who use the name and Social Security number of another person to be able to deceive the system.

The bill proposes having employers use databases of federal agencies in addition to those at Social Security and Department of Homeland Security, like the national directory of new hirings, which originated as part of an effort to ensure payment of child support.

It also proposes the voluntary use of experts from the private sector certified by the federal government who would validate the identity of the workers.

In addition, NEVA would permit people to block the verification of their Social Security number in the case where they are not seeking work themselves.

The businesses that implement all these changes will have immunity from legal action against them if undocumented workers are discovered on their payrolls.

The measure currently has the support of 10 legislators, three Democrats and seven Republicans, as well as the support of a number of organizations and chambers of commerce.

Giffords said that she is not against E-Verify and that on the contrary she supports the idea of implementing it on the national level, though with its faults corrected.

The Democratic congresswoman acknowledged that the problem of illegal immigration cannot be solved just by implementing an employment verification program and she said that she supports immigration reform.

“We would like to see an immigration reform proposal this year in Congress and we’d like our employment verification program plan to be included in it,” she emphasized.

Currently, 11 states demand that businesses use the E-Verify program. EFE