The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
How E-Verify works ... and doesn’t
Despite a state law requiring employers to use a federal system to check whether workers are legally eligible to work in the United States, five companies operating poultry plants in Mississippi last week have for years managed to hire unauthorized immigrants, investigators say. The raids, which ensnared 680 workers, exposed a weakness in the government’s online E-Verify tool that President Donald Trump promoted during his campaign, but which his own businesses did not broadly use until this year, after revelations that Trump’s golf clubs have long employed undocumented immigrants.
How E-Verify works
The federal employment verification system checks the personal information new hires submit against existing government records and flags any mismatches. But it doesn’t detect when the new hire is using someone else’s identification to elude the check — a significant weakness, say critics of the program.
“As soon as E-Verify went into effect, people realized they could still get a job by taking or borrowing other people’s identities,” said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “E-Verify is easy to fool because it approves the document, not the worker.”
Employers often turn a blind eye, he said, by knowingly hiring immigrants who borrowed relatives’ Social Security numbers or stole the identities of the deceased.
The employers’ role
Not all employers always use the E-Verify system — even when it’s required by state law.
Only about half of new hires in Mississippi were screened through E-Verify in 2017, according to separate analyses by Cato and Pew.
“E-Verify has been sold as a silver bullet fix to illegal immigration but it has never been able to deliver,” Nowrasteh said. “E-Verify is barely used half of the time in states where it’s mandated, and punishments are rarely meted out to businesses who fail to comply. If conservative states like Mississippi won’t enforce E-Verify, what hope is there in the rest of the country?”
In Mississippi, the companies — Koch Foods, Peco Foods, PH Food, A&B and Pearl River Foods — intentionally hired a stream of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants who are not authorized to work in the United States “for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain,” according to search warrant affidavits unsealed in federal court after the Aug. 7 raids.
Around the nation
Nationally, 10% of U.S. employers are enrolled in E-Verify, which started more than 20 years ago. Eight states require nearly all employers to use the system: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.
“E-Verify is popular among politicians because it doesn’t work but it makes the politician look like a tough immigration enforcer,” Nowrasteh said. “Thus, many will get the political benefits without forcing their districts to pay a heavy economic cost.”
A 2012 audit commissioned by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services division of the Department of Homeland Security, which maintains E-Verify, found that the system had erroneously cleared nearly half of unauthorized workers because of document fraud.
USCIS officials acknowledge the system’s shortcomings and have begun linking to photos from state driver’s license databases in an effort to make it easier for employers to spot fraud.
If E-Verify were effective in weeding out unauthorized workers, Nowrasteh said, workplace raids wouldn’t be necessary. The only effective long-term solution to illegal employment would be to allow more migrants to work legally in the United States, he said.
“Illegal immigrants are working in the United States because American employers and consumers demand the goods and services they supply,” Nowrasteh said.