Myth: A national electronic verification system alone will solve the problem of illegal immigration.
Fact: Many law-abiding employers seek to comply with the law and hire legal workers to fill their open positions. This can be determined by the significant number of employers that complete I-9 forms and use the voluntary E-Verify/electronic employer verification system.
- E-Verify is an Internet based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in partnership with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and administered by the United States Citizenship and Information Service (USCIS) that allows participating employers to electronically verify the employment eligibility of their newly hired employees. E-Verify is free and voluntary. (USCIS Website, http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis)
- More than 141,000 employers are enrolled in the program, with over 7 million queries run through the system in fiscal year 2009 (as of August 8, 2009), with the number of employers participating voluntarily growing by 1,200 per week. (Department of Homeland Security Website, www.dhs.gov).
- In 2006, the last year that the Department of Homeland Security published results, more than 2 million employee verification checks were processed using E-verify. (USCIS Website).
- According to the USCIS, 96.9 percent of employees are automatically confirmed as work authorized either instantly or within 24 hours, requiring no employee/employer action. This represents an improvement over the 96.1 percent statistic previously reported for the April through June 2008 time period.
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Do illegal immigrants contribute more to the economy than the cost attributable to them associated with public education and health care for their families?
Fact: Undocumented workers contribute to the US economy.
- Undocumented workers comprise 5% of the American workforce, but are concentrated in low-skilled jobs such as farming, food production, construction and domestic workers and maintenance. (The Perryman Report, p. 27 ff)
- Undocumented workers are responsible for $651,511,000,000 in annual economic output and $1.757 trillion in annual spending. (The Perryman Report, p. 6)
Fact: Native-born Americans are not entering the workforce in unskilled jobs, and thus America’s workforce needs must be met from another population.
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Undocumented or foreign born workers take away jobs from Americans.
Fact: Undocumented workers fill open jobs for low-skill work in critical industries such as agriculture, construction and food services that are not being filled by native-born workers.
- The majority of undocumented workers are concentrated in areas of high demand for low-skilled work, such as farming, food services, construction and in-home domestic work. (The Perryman Report, p. 30)
- “In 1960, about 50% of men in this country joined the low-skilled labor force without completing high school; the number is now less than 10%.” (“Late, Great Immigration Debate,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2007, as cited by The Perryman Report, p. 31.)
- This critique assumes that unemployed Americans from the financial or manufacturing sectors in the Northeast would move to areas of high demand and engage in low-skilled work such as picking crops, butchering meat or hanging dry wall in the Southwest.
Fact: Foreign-born workers fill critical needs for doctors, nurses and engineers that cannot otherwise be filled by the native-born workforce.
- 40 percent of America’s high skilled positions in engineering and medical services are filled by foreign-born, qualified personnel. Their visas depend on employers being unable to first find qualified people to fill that position from among the existing workforce.
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