Also not true. They are required to keep copies on file, along with copies of state ID or driver’s license (and/or visa in that case).
Sure. But not birth cert or anything like that.
Of course, ICE has ways to check that the business owners dont.
No, but they were likely given a SocSec card and a DrLic. Those likely didnt obviously appear to be false. How would they check?
Unless you are a Federal government agent, there is no way to know if someone is here legally or not.
I’m not normally one to cite Cato, but if this information about E-Verify is anywhere close to correct, it’s pretty much useless:
And keep in mind that if you only give extra scrutiny to people you suspect may be presenting fraudulent documents, you are racially profiling.
e-Verify is really a bit of a joke. I don’t use it in my shop, but I’ve had to use it when I was a manager for other people. It sucks. It not only returns false positives occasionally, but also allows ineligible workers through the majority of the time. I takes a decent amount of time (I’ve never timed it, but I’d say somewhere around 20 minutes) adding to the cost of hiring new employees. Sometimes, you get a quick response, sometimes, it takes a few days. Keep in mind, if you use e-verify, you have to use it for all ALL your hires, not just the hispanic ones.
Have you (sorry, Johny Ace, as that is who I am responding to, even though he is not quoted) ever hired anyone? Do you know what is involved in determining eligibility? Take look at this list (small pdf). Can you say that you could look at and determine the authenticity of all those documents?
If you are not an expert in a particular type of document, do you think you could ask them to bring in another? No, you cannot, that would be illegal.
Add to that that many managers do not even understand these rules as is. I have been hired several times without ever being asked for eligibility documents, and, I have had several times when the hiring manager asked my for my SS card (which they are not allowed to do, they are only allowed to ask that you bring in a document from each list, not tell you which one it should be). I even had one annoying time when I had just washed my wallet and destroyed my SS card, and had applied for a new one right before I was changing jobs. The hiring manager wouldn’t take the receipt of application, even though I pointed right at the words in the document that we were filling out that they had to.
Given that level of ignorance in hiring managers, and the difficulty in detecting fraudulent documents to those who are not trained experts in fraud, I don’t blame the small business for being defrauded into hiring someone who is ineligible for work.
As** Lord Felton **points out, EVerify isnt very good.
I’ve had to do it from the other side plenty of times. I do contract work, and I’ve had to provide those documents numerous time. I’ve never used E-Verify to verify myself, because I already know my documents are legal.
But if this government service is so bad using DHS and SSA records, how is it that magically ICE knows where it doesn’t? How many of those who-knows-how-many raiders were experts in document recognition?
And that is another avenue of people working when they are not eligible. Contract work.
If I pay someone $20 to shovel my snow or mow my yard, do I need to ask them to verify their eligibility? What if I hire the for tree work or landscaping, and pay them hundred or thousands for the work?
What due diligence do I, as a consumer of services, need to do to ensure that those I am contracting for those services are eligible workers?
I don’t know what kind of contracting work you do, and that you have been asked to provide documentation tells me that you probably do contract work for other companies, but if/when you do work for homeowners or really small businesses, do they ask you to prove your eligibility?
As to the workings of ICE and other government agencies, I couldn’t tell you exactly how they function. But I can say that is is much more likely that any random ICE agent has been much better trained in recognizing fraudulent immigration documentation than most if not virtually all hiring managers.
It’s their job, it is what they are hired and trained to do, nothing magical about being better at your job than someone who does not do that job.
I generally don’t contract with small companies, and definitely not consumers. There’s not enough money in it in IT.
When you hire a small company, you’re trusting them to have done their due diligence. That’s not on the consumer, it’s on the company. As far as individual work like paying some kid to mow your lawn it’s apples and oranges. If you hire some guy you don’t know to do it and you don’t do that due diligence, then it’s on you. But in that case it generally escapes the notice of enforcement authorities.
In other words, ICE is better at DHS’ job than they are. (Not that that would surprise me, my run-ins with DHS have left me, shall we say, less than admiring.) And if those employers don’t even bother to vet the information they’re given, they are negligent, or as I said, possibly directly complicit.
ICE is part of DHS.
So, you are saying that if you call a landscaping company to fix up your yard and cut down some trees, you are going to run check the eligibility of all the employees?
That some serious due diligence, and I don’t think that it is required.
When I was doing landscaping, I never even had a homeowner verify that we were insured (we weren’t, not a good idea). That’ll get you in much bigger issue than immigration, if someone is hurt on your property, and they are not properly covered by their employer’s insurance, they can come after your homeowner’s policy.
Not sure that follows, I said nothing about DHS, and as John Mace points out, ICE is part of DHS. I said only that trained agents like ICE, and probably many others, in DHS, or even in your local LEO community are going to be far better at spotting fraudulent documents than a hiring manager.
Vet in what way? We’ve already talked about the shortfalls in E-Verify. If documentation is produced that is not obviously fraudulent, what would you have them do?
And keep in mind, whatever vetting you are having them do, they have to do for ALL hires, not just the ones that are “suspicious”.
What about “When you hire a small company, you’re trusting them to have done their due diligence” do you find unclear? But just to clarify (?), you’re trusting that company to have verified their own employees’ right to work.
(sarcasm)Not even try to verify the documents.(/sarcasm)
And? Not once have I said there should be any kind of profiling. It should be SOP to screen all employees.
This part
But I see that you are talking about hiring an individual there, not a company. I’m not sure what the difference is. Most landscaping companies around here are a one or two man team. Where are you drawing the line between an individual and a company?
So, as a homeowner, you would not feel obligated to look into the eligibility of the people you hire?
What do you mean here? What are you having the hiring manager do to verify the documents? I don’t know if you have hired anyone before, but there are quite a number of documents that can be presented, are you versed in all of them well enough to tell if they are fraudulent?
What specific action would you have a hiring manager do to verify the documents?
I don’t disagree, and I don’t know if you are coming from that place, but I have seen people propose rather elaborate and time involved systems to verify the eligibility of workers. When it is pointed out that that will increase the cost of hiring new employees substantially, they explain that you would only have to do it for the ones that are here illegally.
Like I said, I have had several times when I was hired that they never bothered to look at my SS card, they just filled out my I-9 without it. The fact that I am very white probably had something to do with it. If you have a system that is hard and/or time consuming to use, it will only be used for those who are suspected of ‘needing’ the extra vetting.
If that is not your position, if you feel that that whatever method for verification should be done equally to all hires, then at least you are not going down that trap.
Not in my experience. There’s the designer and then there’s the crew. As for gardeners, I haven’t seen too many that don’t have at least a team of workers, even a ‘small’ company.
I do, by finding the best company for the job (which doesn’t necessarily mean the cheapest). Don’t you do research on the companies you hire?
Umm as I already stated, use E-Verify? I think it’s a free service, so I don’t see what significant obstacles there are to doing so. Taking a few minutes to enter the info? Having to wait a generally limited amount of time for results? Wait for them before hiring the prospective employee. How tough is that?
Regardless of the apparent objections to E-Verify, they’re not excuses for not using it at all. And, as far as I know, it’s the only service available that is that convenient. Sure, you could do your own research, but that would be even more time-consuming and less likely to catch infractors. Or is there some other, more reliable and/or convenient service that you would suggest? There’s no excuse for just accepting that the documents are correct.
That’s never happened to me since 9/11, but then I tend to work for large companies.
That’s what I said.
To cut down a tree in my front yard? How much should I do? I look online, and read a few reviews.
So, if I use it, and I hire and undocumented immigrant, an he passes, because 56% percent of eligible workers pass it, then that’s just fine then?
It is not that convenient. It is not always functioning. I’ve had to put off hires for days at a time while it was down in the past (when I worked for a company that used it), and often had to wait days to get a reply when it was working.
I don’t have the luxury of waiting around a week or two to wait on a reply from the system to fill a position that need s filling now.
I’ve never had it happen to me, but it will also return false positives. Making you not be able to hire people that are eligible for work.
A system like e-verfy may be useful, but E-Verify itself is not.
What do you consider to be a large company? Applebees has 2000 locations with 28,000 employees. They didn’t bother to take a look at my ss card.
I’m sure you know this, but what you are describing is called document abuse, which is illegal. Although, I understand if you don’t want to make a big issue out of it when starting a new job.
Also, if you have a list A document, you can use that on its own. Personally, I use my passport card when starting a new job.
I’m not sure what ‘just fine’ is supposed to mean, but at least you have proof that you tried to verify.
An emergency situation requiring new hires? Like, yesterday? That’s pretty rare, unless you’re talking about high-level people in an industry, like some kind of system design guru or some such, and in that case he/she is likely to be pretty well-known in the corporate world.
If you mean Johnny and Billie quit and you won’t have enough to staff your Applebee’s, to use an example, I’m sure you can stretch your staff until it comes through. It’s still not an excuse for not verifying.
Ah, I get it. I thought you meant e-verfy was another service. Nevermind…
Applebee’s is a franchise, much like McDonald’s, 7-11, etc. Corporate requirements are promulgated down the chain, but it’s still on the individual owner. Of course, since it’s possible in many situations that I could be exposed to sensitive data, software, or practices, I might be more thoroughly vetted than your average employee…but I’ve still never not been asked for my paperwork.
Yeah, yeah, I know, double negative.
Guys, perhaps this is too much of a hijack?
If the objective is to prevent ineligible workers from working, then just going through the motions doesn’t seem to do much, other than maybe make some people feel good.
I suppose if you are saying it’s a CYA, then sure it is, but a CYA, almost by definition, doesn’t actually address the problem.
Not rare at all in the restaurant industry. We were always understaffed, so if we were even further down, then there really was no “stretching of staff”, it was just “run long wait times, long ticket times, make more mistakes because of haste, and lose not only a bunch of money from customers that couldn’t get in, comps for customers who complained, but also business in the future because of the lower quality service given due to understaffing, and maybe lose some more employees from the cluster that is created.”
If you have a bad week in the restaurant industry, that can ruin your whole year, or even drive you entirely out of business.
Having a bad week due to poor management is the restaurant’s problem. Having a bad week because of third party becurccratic slow responses is not the restaurant owner’s fault.
Some are franchise, some are corporate. The specific one that this happened at was a corporate store.
Yeah, I would tend to get into enough trouble later on when I started criticising their abuses of labor law and employment, no reason to start at orientation.
My passport is highly expired now, but while I had it, I did try using it. It pretty much just confused people. They would insist that they needed my SS card, even though I would read the relevant text to them.
Is it? I don’t know, employment law and eligibility are not directly related to the tax plan, but they certainly are effected by and affect how employers will react to the new tax plan. Mayhap this tangent has strayed too far from the subject.