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.
  • 0.3 percent of employees who receive initial mismatches later confirmed work authorized after contesting and resolving the mismatch.
  • 2.8 percent of employees receive final non-confirmations (FNCs)

Fact: Employers cannot selectively question documents that are presented to them by potential employees for I-9 without risk of violating civil rights laws.

• “To request to see identity and employment eligibility documents only from persons of a particular origin, or from persons who appear or sound foreign, is a violation of the employer sanctions laws and may also be a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You should not discharge present employees, refuse to hire new employees, or otherwise discriminate on the basis of foreign appearance, accent, language, or name.” (Form I-9 Compliance Website , http://www.formi9.com/form-i9-faqs.aspx#discrimination, sponsored by Form I-9 Compliance, LLC)
• Legal experts counsel that the only way to avoid discriminating against certain employees and still comply with the law is to apply the employment eligibility verification procedures to all newly hired employees and by hiring without respect to the national origin or citizenship status of those persons authorized to work in the United States. (Form I-9 Compliance Website)

Fact: E-verify has a low error rate, and a fast turn-around for verifying employment eligibility.

• 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. (USCIS Website, Westat Survey of E-Verify effectiveness)
  • 0.3 percent of employees who receive initial mismatches later confirmed work authorized after contesting and resolving the mismatch.
  • 2.8 percent of employees receive final non-confirmations (FNCs)
• As of May 5, 2008, the E-Verify system includes naturalization data, which helps to instantly confirm the citizenship status of naturalized U.S. citizens hired by E-Verify employers. Naturalized citizens who have not yet updated their records with the Social Security Administration (SSA) are the largest category of work-authorized persons who initially face an SSA mismatch in E-Verify. (USCIS Website)
• The Department of Homeland Security continues to add new verification databases to the E-Verify system, to decrease the error rate even further. These new databases include the 14.8 million images stored in the DHS’s immigration system were added recently. In addition, DHS now includes the list of those students who have been approved for extension of the optional practical training program.

Fact: Without an increase in non-immigrant work visas for both high and low skilled workers, law abiding employers who use an e-verify system will be left either without employees to fill positions or will result in Americans taking lower paying jobs. The net effect is to shrink the U.S. economy.

• “Under policies that reduce illegal immigration, the occupational mix of U.S. workers shifts in a way that reduces their overall productivity.” (Cato Institute Report, August 13, 2009, pp. 4-5)
• As for a policy that focuses on sanctioning employers (enforcement only, without expanding the possible number of available visas), the Cato Institute states “the effects of tighter internal enforcement … reduce the welfare of U.S. households in 2019 by 0.45 percent” or close to $80 billion. (Cato Institute Report, August 13, 2009, p. 10)
• The net effect of enforcement-only policies – including mandating an electronic verification system with penalties for employers without providing a mechanism to increase the legal workforce – will shrink the American economy and harm U.S. households through loss of income. (Cato Institute Report, August 13, 2009, p. 10)

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¹Form I-9 Compliance of Newport Beach, CA, was the first federally-approved Designated Agent of the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration for electronic Form I-9 employment verifications. With the passage of IRCA in 1986, two of the company’s founders worked closely with the INS to develop the original Form I-9.