Instead of "Build the wall", "E-verify, E-verify, E-verify"

Great Debates
1

So it turns out that E-verify isn’t required nationwide.

I am actually pretty shocked to learn this. Note that e-verify, combined with modest enforcement effort from ICE, would make employment of illegal immigrants very difficult.

Current requirement: Employer has to ‘examine’ the employment documents and sign a form saying they appear valid.

How to bypass: Anyone with a readily available printer can make a plastic card that resembles a driver’s license. Professional ID forgers can make it match exactly and of course put the photo of the person getting the card made on it. The social security card is a chintzy paper card that is even more trivial to copy.

With E-verify, yes, someone could still bypass using a name, driver’s license number, and social security card that are all someone else’s identity. Except that now there’s a database entry. So after the second, and third, and so on illegal immigrant uses the same false identity, it would be fairly trivial to make this trip a software alert and send ICE detectives to investigate.

E-verify would actually reduce illegal immigration and employment, and it would be far more effective than a wall. Presumably cheaper as well.

I’m no Constitutional lawyer, but requiring all employers nationwide to do it sounds like it falls under the enumerated power of the Commerce clause. Congress should be able to force every employer in the country to do it as the employment of immigrants who have illegally crossed state lines clearly affects the national market for labor.

What say you, remaining conservative posters on this board? Do you agree or disagree that this is a good idea?

2

This might be burdensome to smaller businesses. Perhaps requiring all employers with 50 or more employees to use E-Verify might be a bit more practical.

3

Better than a wall, yes. However, if these illegal immigrants are here and working, that means they’re paying taxes (unless they’re being paid in cash only, but the cash only jobs could also just ignore E-VERIFY). Why would we want to deport someone who has a job and is contributing to our society?

4

If you change I9 requirements so that employers have to file an I9 return, and the Government has to verify the return, then we could accomplish the same thing. In my 26 year career, I’ve only seen one company ever audited for I9 compliance.

5

Umm, how? Could we discuss in more details how burdensome it is to enter a person’s documents into a website. Well, you need a computer and internet access. And how long do you think per employee. 15 minutes? An hour?

How big a burden are you anticipating?

…what. So the Federal government is de facto a willing participant in illegal immigration. They are on purpose letting millions of them work (and yes, displace American workers or at least drive down their wages) while show deporting a few thousand of them.

This is actually a reasonable argument for amnesty. De facto, the federal government has allowed these people to stay, sometimes decades, and have children here. They shouldn’t be kicked out.

Then why don’t we let these people in openly instead of forcing them to be a permanent underclass? Do you think there should be any limit to the numbers allowed through?

6

Because a society that has a farcical set of laws that can be ignored by the powerful for political and monetary gain is almost the definition of corrupt?

7

We should have some sort of work residency program to handle these people, definitely. If they want to stay and become citizens, there should be a process for that, too, but it can definitely take longer and require more effort.

I don’t think we should arbitrarily declare, “We want X Mexicans and Y Chinese” or anything like that though.

8

Are you talking about our tax code?

9

Also How to bypass: have the employer be part of it. They can either pay you under the table or find some other workaround. Keep in mind, even with false credentials, they’re not stupid, but everything has to be good enough to give them plausible deniability.

We [employers] already have to collect their ID and eligibility info, verify that nothing appears off, copy down the info (and photocopy in some cases) and then [again, the employer] has to sign the I9 form stating that everything is correct. Sticking that info into a free, online service, shouldn’t be a big deal. In fact, we already have to report new hires (electronically, typically) to the state. It seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult to combine that into one website. Either that the state passes along the info to e-verify, or New Hire reporting could be done on a federal level, instead of state by state, and it could all be part of the e-verify site.

I’ve never given that much thought so I don’t know if it’s plausible. In any case, there’s plenty to do for new hires. I can’t imagine adding e-verify to the process could take more than a minute or two.

Having said that, I’m for e-verify. I don’t use it at my work currently, but I’d have no problem doing it and certainly wouldn’t fight it if it became mandatory.
I suppose it could make the people working illegally just do a better job of covering their tracks, but it may also make some of those people work towards becoming eligible.
I also don’t mind the idea of taking, at least some of, the responsibility of deciding if someone can legally work off the shoulders of the employers and putting it where it belongs, with the government.

I do agree with the premise, if you want to keep people out, it’s not about the wall. Make finding work more difficult. If you punish employers enough that they don’t find the risk provides enough reward, they’ll stop hiring people that aren’t eligible.
Something else that I’m guessing a lot of people don’t realize, but l0k1 touched upon it upthread and I mentioned it in the other thread. A new employee fills out the first half of the I-9, they bring it to the employer along with their documents and the employer fills out and signs the second half of the I-9. Then the employer takes that I-9 and files it away. It doesn’t get faxed or emailed or electronically submitted to anyone. We don’t use the info to fill out an online form, nothing. Nothing ever happens with it, the next time it gets touched is likely when the employee no longer works there and it gets moved to a different filing cabinet.
That, IMO, is a big reason why this is so easy. There’s no (gov) oversight.

10

The reason is obvious. The way it works now immigrant haters can ignore the havoc that getting rid of all these people would cause. I wonder if Trump used E-verify for his properties.

Here’s a proposal: make E-verify mandatory for everyone. If a worker fails, give the employer a month, say, to find someone else for the job at the same salary. If the employer can’t, the worker is not taking a job away from an “American” and so becomes legal.
Friendly amendment: allow the employer to jack up the salary for the job posting. But if he still can’t find anyone to replace the immigrant, the immigrant gets the higher wages.

A rational immigration policy would be a lot better, but this could be a start.

11

I know you asked for conservatives, but on this topic, I think I am probably to the right of quite a bit of the board.

E-verify needs to be improved dramatically first.

Right now, it doesn’t really do much. It doesn’t check to tell if the documents presented belong to the person presenting them. It doesn’t tell if they are real or if they are fake. All it does is tells whether or not a particular taxpayer ID (typically SS #) is being used suspiciously. It will allow a large number of unauthorized workers to fall through the cracks.

As far as false positives, that creates a headache for employer and employee. I’ve never been flagged, but when I worked for a utility company, one of the guys that got hired with me got flagged. They straightened it out eventually, but he was on basic office duty while the rest of us were in training. I was out of training and making another $2.50 an hour before he started training, about 6 weeks. So, E-verify cost the employee $2.50 an hour times 40 hours times 6 weeks, or about $600, not including overtime, and it cost the company a few weeks of paying him while he was being very unproductive. It was something that happened somewhat frequently, so they had makework for people appealing E-verify, but it was still a hassle.

That was the only company that I worked for with e-verify (that I know of), which is good, as I did a lot of job hopping in my 20’s. There were many years where I would have 6 or more jobs in that year, sometimes with 3 or more being concurrent. I’m sure if they had e-verify, I’d have been flagged a few times.

If I ran e-verify at my place, then I would have to accept that occasionally I would get an employee that I could not legally fire for failing e-verify, but couldn’t really invest training in either, in case it comes back that it was a true positive. That could be very costly.

As for the time involved, sure, it’s not a whole bunch, but it’s just one more burden that you are placing on businesses. To say it doesn’t cost anything is to say my time is worthless.

The only way for it to work well would be to collect biometric data on all authorized workers in the US. Is that something that the conservatives on this board would be able to endorse?
Tell you what, make e-verify mandatory, but have exceptions for small businesses (defined as having fewer than 20ish employees, revenues of 1-2 million, or no single person having more than $150,000 in personal income).

12

It’s not like golly gee shucks, we just can’t figure out the solution to all these illegal immigrants and if we just came up with the right idea, all of it would be fixed.

The fundamental thing you need to understand about the American immigration policy, as it has been implemented for decades, is that it’s not designed to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, it’s designed to keep them in the country but with no rights so they can be used as a source of cheaper labor. Everything about how immigration is enforced in practice is grounded in a tacit understanding that this is the goal, while there’s just enough of an on paper legal framework to provide plausible deniability to those who aren’t paying close enough attention.

You need to accept this as a basic starting point to the conversation before you’re able to have any kind of realistic conversation about what can be done about illegal immigration.

13

E-Verify is very unreliable.

This is a very bad idea.

Look, ICE agents are constantly arresting US Citizens as “illegals” and they have e-verify and more. What make you think it’s worth a bucket of warm piss?

14

I had no idea it was this crappy. A sane “E-verify” system would :

a. Collect some kind of biometric of the employee. A photo of their face is fine.
b. In the back end, the biometrics would get cross referenced to other users of that SSN.
c. Impose no direct burden on the employer. Instead, it triggers an investigation and the employer is not directly aware of it. A detective will come and interview the suspicious employee. If they turn out to not be a citizen, well, they get first notified in writing that they have been found not to be a citizen and they have 90 days or so to either produce evidence proving they are, or they can sign up for the transportation back to their home country.

Failing to comply in 90 days, that would be when jails get used.

15

Requiring a computer and internet access might be burdensome to some small businesses. If I have a lawn care company consisting of myself and two employees it’s possible my entire operation is done offline. Most federal laws & regulations regarding employee/employer relationships only apply to businesses with a minimum number of people. For some that minimum number might be 15 and for others it might be 50. From a practical standpoint I think you’re better off making the E-Verify requirement apply to businesses that employ a lot of people.

16

That’s complicated. You are essentially doing facial recognition on all new hires in the entire country. First you have to gather and store that info for your database, then every single time that I get another job, you have to send my data in to be verified again.

Not that it cannot be done, but it’ll be complicated and expensive and there may be those who feel that it is an invasion of their privacy.

As an employer, I don’t mind that. But I am still doing a good faith check first, right? I don’t want to spend time investing into employees if I don’t know whether or not they will dragged off by ICE in the next few months.

And in the cases where the employer was knowingly complicit, or conspired in the creation or acquisition of fraudulent documents, then the employer can very well be held liable as well, both civil and criminal.

17

Quoted For This-Can’t-Be-Said-Too Often. The system is like it is because that’s the way the people who designed it wanted it to be. “Illegality” is a crucial part of it.

It’s probably no accident that the Great Deporter was a Democrat. He hadn’t gotten with the program.

The Current Occupant may be going a bit far with his recent terrorisation schemes - in the current low-unemployment environment, if people really stopped coming (and arrivals are down) and all the 50+ meat packers, hotel maids and construction workers decided working was too dangerous and they’d retire and be supported by their legal citizen kids, the system would start to falter.

On the other hand, they’re not above stirring the pot some more in South America in order to fix that problem

18

This was the employers fault. No adverse action may be taken against an employee based on a tentative nonconfirmation result from E-Verify. The proper thing to do is to provide the employee with the Further Action Notice from E-Verify, ask the employee if they wish to context the TNC, and then wait for the final results before taking adverse action against the employee.

19

They did not take adverse action against the employee. He still worked there, he still got paid. He just didn’t get a promotion that he was never promised. As training was 6 weeks of offsite work with instructors and quite a bit of equipment and material, it makes sense for them to not invest that heavily into someone who may not be there soon. I conservatively estimate that they paid at least $10,000 on my training, if you include my pay, the cost of me driving their vehicle all over the state, the materials I used, the rent on the location that we used, and paying the instructors.

It was a very large company, and this was pretty standard practice, so I assume that they made sure that how they were doing it was legal.

Hmmm, I can’t find a direct answer either way, but if your company offers a signing bonus, would that bonus need to be paid to the employee before the matter was resolved? If so, can you claw it back from their pay if it turns out that they are not legal?

20

You’d effectively be telling the Old Order Mennonites, the Amish, and other Plain People that they aren’t allowed to hire anybody.

Looks like a pretty sizeable burden to me.

And there are a lot of other people who have very limited Internet access, even if they want it.

This.

If the undocumented labor force all disappeared, the rest of the country would be left with a really huge mess.

But all attempts to set up a process for legal work documentation that would actually cover the number of people needed in the number of jobs that we need them for get blocked in Congress. Let alone any attempt to allow people working in the USA for years on end to – gasp – live with their families!

Current facial recognition technology is also far from perfect. And it works less well if used on people who happen not to be white.