Debunking Three More E-Verify Myths

Third in a series on E-Verify.

I’ve explained how E-Verify works. It is an effective way to restrict illegal employment. For some, that’s the best reason to attack E-Verify. Today, I’m going to respond to three more myths that critics rely on.

1. Some claim that E-Verify is burdensome for employers. In fact, it’s a bit less burdensome than ordering books for the first time from Amazon.com. An employer enters data about a new hire into 5 to 8 fields – name, social security number, date of birth, and other data that an employer already records on the Form I-9. Then, for noncitizens using DHS documents, the employer compares the employee’s ID photo to the photo displayed on the screen. That’s it.

Anyone who has seen it done once can do it, and the process takes a few minutes. Understanding the rules that go with the process requires a bit of online training, but that takes at most an hour or two. Plus, E-Verify makes it unlikely that a company will get a Social Security Administration notice at the end of the year indicating that some of its new hires have Social Security Numbers that don’t match their names. So time spent now on verification will save hassles later.

You don’t have to rely on me, though, for assurance that E-Verify is easy to use.
As one commenter to this blog series wrote, “the E-Verify System is a great thing! Every employer should be using it. We use it here at work and it’s EASY, QUICK and COST EFFECTIVE. Absolutely no hassle at all! There is no good reason why any legitimate company employing legitimate people would not want to participate in this program.” In fact, an independent evaluation performed by Westat found that 96 percent of E-Verify employers agreed that the system does not overburden their staff, see page 65 of the report (PDF).

2. Another set of critics claims that E-Verify is discriminatory. They conjure up evil employers who disfavor certain ethnic groups when they apply government hiring rules. But if you’re worried about discrimination in administering ID requirements, E-Verify is the solution not the problem. Employers don’t have discretion to discriminate when they use E-Verify. The computers behind E-Verify don’t pay attention to ethnicity; they just ask whether the applicant’s records are in order. That takes the discretion, and thus the opportunity for discrimination, out of the process.

The other form of discrimination often mentioned in this context is the notion that people who need time to correct problems with their records will be fired, or that employers will only selectively apply E-Verify to some employees. The short answer is that E-Verify prohibits both. Employers must allow workers more than a week to contact Social Security or DHS to cure any problems with the workers’ records. (Once a new hire makes contact with the relevant agency, 95 percent of the time the problem is resolved within 2 days.) Employers who act against a worker earlier can be fined by the Department of Justice for a civil rights violation. The same is true for those who apply E-Verify selectively.

3. The final myth is that E-Verify does nothing about identity theft, so the system is easy to beat. Not true. The criticism might hold water if E-Verify did nothing but check for mismatched names and SSNs. But E-Verify does more than that. We are already implementing measures that make identity theft far more difficult. The system rejects the SSNs of workers who have died. And we are increasingly able to display the photo that should be on identity cards presented by workers. This “photo tool” has already identified hundreds of cases of document and identity fraud and prevented identity thieves from gaining unlawful employment. In the long run, E-Verify should allow employers to verify the photos on all identity documents that are accepted for employment.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments. For more information on E-Verify, visit the E-Verify web page.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy

Debunking the “E-Verify Capacity Problem”

Second in a series on E-Verify.

Another myth is that the E-Verify program doesn’t have the capacity to handle the heavy load that would result if many states adopt laws requiring its use.

Critics say that only 60 thousand employers are registered with E-Verify, while there are 6 million employers in the U.S. But this is an example of using an accurate statistic to produce a misleading result. Many of those 6 million employers won’t hire a single worker this year. Others will hire thousands.

What counts is how many individual hires the system can handle. And on that measure, E-Verify is performing well. In fact, it is rapidly becoming a commonplace experience for U.S. workers.

According to the Department of Labor, there were 7.8 million non-farm new hires in the first two months of 2008. In the same period, over a million new hires were checked through E-Verify. On that basis, E-Verify is handling one in eight new hires already. Even more conservative estimates that include agricultural hires show that E-Verify is handling at least 10 percent of all new hires in the U.S. this year. Either way, there’s no reason to think it won’t be able to handle further expansion. Indeed, the number of employers in the system has quadrupled in just the last year (from 16,000 to more than 66,000), and we’ve performed more queries in the last seven months (3.58 million) than we did in all of 2007 FY (3.21 million). Based on a recent load testing, the system has the capacity to handle 240 million queries a year. That’s three to four times the number of people who are usually hired in a given year.

Many businesses are beginning to recognize the value of E-Verify. It helps protect them from incurring penalties for employing illegal immigrants. State legislators are also recognizing the value of the program, encouraging their contractors and licensors to sign up. Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Utah currently have legislation or executive orders that encourage or require the use of E-Verify.[*] We’ve welcomed the states’ confidence in E-Verify, and we’re confident that the program is well-positioned to handle the growth we foresee in future years.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy

[* update 1: Illinois was mistakenly included in the original post.]
[* update 2: added "encourage"]

Debunking the “E-Verify Error Rate”

Everyone agrees that illegal immigrants cross our borders because they want to work here. If we can reduce the lure of illegal employment, we can reduce the pressure on our borders.

That’s exactly what E-Verify does. When an E-Verify employer hires a new worker, the employer gets on line and fills out a short electronic form. As soon as the employer hits “send,” the system checks to make sure that the worker’s name matches his Social Security Number. If the worker is not a U.S. citizen, the system also checks to make sure his work authorization is still valid and shows the employer the picture that should be on the DHS-issued identity card. For most workers, verification is instantaneous.

E-Verify is simple, free, and highly effective in preventing illegal work. It works, and maybe that’s what the interests arrayed against E-Verify don’t like. Whatever the reason, opponents of E-Verify have resorted to charges that just don’t hold up. In this series, I debunk the myths.

The opposition to E-Verify often claims that the program has a high error rate. Some critics claim that the error rate is as high as 4% and will lead to millions of Americans losing their jobs by mistake.

To see how wrong this claim is, we need to look more closely at how E-Verify works. We can draw a precise picture of what happens to a thousand applicants who use E-Verify by using data gathered from October 2006 to March 2007 by Westat, an independent reviewer.


Of the thousand, 942 are instantly verified. Instant verification of legal workers surely can’t be an error.

Fifty-eight are told that they have to do something more to establish that they are lawfully authorized to work. Usually this means they have to go to Social Security to correct the mismatch in name and number. (Typos and similar problems are cured on line, so legal workers usually have a problem only if they changed their names or citizenship status but failed to tell Social Security of the change.)

So five of the thousand must go to Social Security and straighten out their records. For 90% of them, the process takes less than 2 days. Is that an error rate? If so, it’s ten times lower than our critics claim. And, is it really an error to tell workers that their social security credits aren’t being properly recorded? Sooner or later, the worker will want to collect benefits, and they won’t want to face doubts about who earned the credits. (Of course, straightening out Social Security records isn’t fun, but we’re working to reduce the hassle. Just a few weeks ago, we introduced software changes that will automate some of the correction process, reducing the number of legitimate workers who have to go to Social Security offices from five to two or three per thousand.)

That leaves the 53 who walk away. Is that an error rate? There are certainly people who believe it’s an error to keep illegal workers out of the U.S. workforce. But we don’t. It’s our job to enforce the immigration laws.

And common sense suggests that the walkaways are overwhelmingly likely to be illegal workers. It’s just common sense that a legal worker wouldn’t want to walk away from a job he applied for--and has been offered if he straightens out his records. It’s just common sense that a legal worker wouldn’t walk away from the opportunity to correct Social Security records he now knows are wrong – records that will have to be corrected for him to get benefits. And it’s just common sense that about five percent of E-Verify workers would walk away, since a Pew Foundation expert recently estimated that 4.9% of U.S. jobs are held by illegal workers. It’s hard to see the walkaway rate as an error; in fact, that’s the program working as it should.

Stewart Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy

An Immigration Enforcement Tool That Works - For Everyone

Most employers tell us that they don’t want to hire illegal workers. They just aren’t always sure how to tell who’s legal and who’s not. That is where E-Verify comes in. It’s a free and voluntary program that lets employers quickly check the status of new employees online.

E-Verify is an enormous success. It works to make sure the workers’ name and social security number match, and that noncitizen workers are authorized to work. The system is good at keeping illegal workers out of the workplace. About 5% of all the workers who are checked by the system cannot establish that they are authorized to work in the United States. Most of them walk away when they are challenged, even though it’s easy for legal workers to fix their out-of-date information in the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) database. (Actually, it’s not just easy. It’s a really good idea and will help legal workers get Social Security benefits more quickly if they are hurt on the job or when they retire).

What about legal workers? We don’t want to make getting a new job more difficult than it should be. Here too, the story is a good one. For 98% of the workers who are actually authorized to work in the US, the system returns an instant green light – not even a data mismatch to update. Put another way, for practically everyone except the 5% who aren’t legal, E-Verify provides instant verification. No hassles, no sweat, no window for discrimination. Of course, getting to this point has taken a lot of sweat on the part of DHS. We asked Westat, a respected research firm, to do independent evaluations of E-Verify five years ago and again this year, and the Westat evaluation showed that the “instant green light” rate has risen exponentially in those years, thanks largely to improvements in DHS records.

We’re not resting on our laurels, though. We’re working to get from 98 to 99% or higher. We won’t get to 100% because the 2% of work authorized new hires who get a “yellow light” often have forgotten to update their Social Security record. Perhaps they didn’t tell Social Security when they became a U.S. citizen, or when they married and changed their name. Since that’s a problem that needs to be fixed, some would say that they should be pushed into fixing it. However, we are trying to reduce even those cases. Our newest enhancement will allow E-Verify to check naturalization records electronically, even for people who have never notified Social Security of their new status. (The Westat report does not mention this enhancement, since it will not be implemented for another month or so.)

Early next year, we also will provide a 1-800 number to resolve SSA “yellow lights”, which will eliminate time-consuming personal visits to government offices. As an even longer-term improvement, we plan to regularly update the SSA database with naturalized citizen data to prevent mismatches in the future. In addition, we will continue to bring more of our records on line, so that no worker gets a “yellow light” because our records are not up to date; that effort is also underway.

At the same time, we are improving the enforcement capabilities of E-Verify. In order to prevent illegal workers from simply stealing the name and Social Security number of a legal worker, we are putting photos on line, so employers will see the photo that should be on the ID the worker presents.

As a result of these changes, E-Verify is a remarkable success story. The number of employers using it has doubled in each of the last few years, and enrollments are increasing by a thousand employers a week.

It’s an iron law of Washington, though, that if you actually take immigration enforcement seriously, you’re going to make a lot of powerful interests angry. And so it’s not a surprise that the success of E-Verify has engendered a big increase in criticism.

Probably the most aggravating claim, made in a recent article by a business lobbyist, is that E-Verify could increase discrimination against immigrants. I don’t understand why a business representative would accuse his own industry of being prone to discrimination, but even if that’s so, E-Verify won’t make employers more likely to discriminate. In fact, the Westat report found that employers using E-Verify said they were more willing to hire foreign-born workers, not less. Rather than promoting discrimination, E-Verify is actually becoming a safeguard against discrimination, because it objectively verifies the employment authorization of foreign-born workers who might otherwise be the subject of subjective guesses about employment eligibility.

Stewart A. Baker
Assistant Secretary for Policy