The Biggest 2 Lies About E-Verify

by Roy Beck, Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA: Senators are being pounded from seemingly every direction to keep E-Verify out of their Stimulus bill next week (after the House this week put strong E-Verify requirements in their bill to make sure illegal aliens don't get jobs created by the Stimulus). The anti-E-Verify folks are relying on enough Senators believing arguments that are demonstrable lies. You need to be armed to destroy these lies when you write letters to the editor, send faxes, call in to talk radio shows, visit with your friends or phone your Senators' offices this coming week.

AND THE 2 BIGGEST LIES ARE:
LIE NO. 1: AMERICANS WILL LOSE THEIR JOBS DUE TO FAULTY DATABASE
The most outlandish claim by the anti-E-Verify forces has been that using E-Verify will actually lead to more unemployment among Americans. NumbersUSA's claim, of course, is that the universal use of E-Verify would result in employing millions MORE Americans because that many otherwise employed illegal aliens would not be able to get a job, opening the way for American workers. Which is it?

The anti-E-Verify forces claim that Americans will lose their jobs if companies are required to use E-Verify because the databases supposedly are full of so many errors. Typical is this quote:

Sonia Ramirez, legislative representative for the AFL-CIO, said the program misclassified many U.S. citizens and legal workers. The program, which is used on a limited basis, is not "ready for prime time," Ramirez said. -- Los Angeles Times, 31 Jan 09

Rosemary Jenks, the lawyer who heads up NumbersUSA's Capitol Hill Team, has repeatedly and publicly issued a challenge to the media and open-borders advocates to produce even one example of an American losing a job because the E-Verify systemwrongly ordered it.

If it turned out that of millions of transactions a year, there were 10 or 20 mistakes, we would be concerned but also find that to be an understandably tiny problem. But, to date, opponents have NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIND an example of even ONE AMERICAN who lost a job due to problems with E-Verify.

A government investigation of E-Verify in 2007 found:

• 93% of employees queried through the system were verified within 5 seconds!
• another 1.2% were verified within 24 hours with no additional action required of either the employee or the employer
• Most of the 5.8% who received a tentative non-confirmation requiring more time turned out to be illegal aliens
• only 0.5% were U.S. citizens or authorized foreign workers who had to contact the Social Security Administration because of errors in the database

And let's be clear about that 0.5%. Many of the errors were ones that the workers themselves had made, such as a woman not notifying SSA of a change in last name after a marriage. And even if the error was the government's fault, going through E-Verify was a positive experience for most because they needed to know the error existed so they could clean it up before it caused problems down the line.

The 2007 study found that the accuracy rate of E-Verify was 99.5%. Can any government program anywhere claim such a record? And what the critics miss is that the system is set up so that when there is an error, nobody loses a job or is temporarily suspended from a job. The rules require that an employee who gets a tentative non-confirmation will continue to be employed until clearing up the discrepancy. (The illegal aliens, however, typically just don't show up for work after getting the first non-confirmation.)

An independent study between April and June of 2008 by Westat found:

• 96% of employees were verified instantly
• 0.4% had to contact the government to resolve record errors
• 3.5% received final non-confirmations, meaning they were illegal aliens not having the legal right to work

Nearly every reporter in the mainstream media allows open-borders leaders to be quoted saying the E-Verify databases are full of errors that lead to all kinds of mishandling of employees, but the reporters don't allow the statistics above to show up in their stories. The claims about errors are lies, pure and simple.

LIE NO. 2: MANDATING E-VERIFY WILL DELAY STIMULUS MONEY CREATING JOBS

Requiring businesses to enroll in E-Verify could only slow the influx of money and jobs into the economy, said Tyler Moran of the National Immigration Law Center. "It is going to delay the stimulus," she said. "It doesn't belong here." -- Los Angeles Times, 31 Jan 09

How many lies are in that lie? Let me count the ways:

>1. Even if a company happens to hire one of the around 5% of people who don't get an immediate confirmation, they not only are allowed to keep that person on the job, they are required to do so until E-Verify gives a final decision several days later. The flow of Stimulus money into the pockets of a worker is not slowed.

2. The main argument seems to be that companies and governments getting Stimulus money won't have time to get enrolled in E-Verify and will delay taking the Stimulus money because of that. But they don't have to wait until this bill passes. They can get on-line right now and get the enrollment finished long before any money will be flowing.

3. Furthermore, the enrollment process at most takes one staff person a couple of hours to complete. That is only once per company.

4. If a company or organization just feels hamstrung by the simple enrollment, they can pay a third-party company to handle the E-Verify process for them on all of their hires.

5. The Department of Homeland Security last year stated that it would have no trouble handling a doubling or tripling of enrollees and activity over a short time.

6. DHS had no trouble handling the growth from 3.27 million verification queries in FY2007 to 6.6 million in FY2008 and more than 2 million queries just through the first quarter of FY2009.

7. Throughout this rapid expansion, E-Verify has become more accurate, more user-friendly and faster.

Friends, a sign of the power of special interests to still dominate in Washington is that the two big lies about E-Verify continue to be the most common thing you see about the system in the nation's newspapers and from the mouths of the leaders of business, labor, religious and ethnic-identity organizations. Only through the willingness of hundreds of thousands of you to carry the truth to the U.S. Senate this coming week will American workers have a chance to move ahead of illegal aliens to get any jobs that might be created if the Stimulus bill passes.

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