Immigration bill includes worker screening
By Suzanne Gamboa, Associated Press Writer
Di Ann Sanchez, Vice President of Human Resources at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport sits behind her desk in her office in Irving, Texas, Friday, May 25, 2007. Sanchez, sees a big bottleneck on the horizon when the airport has to make sure its 1,700 employees are legal workers, even those employed for decades. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
The nation’s employers say a major problem with system overload is on the way if Congress forces them to prove, electronically, that all their workers are legal. Currently, 16,727 employers check employees through a system previously known as Basic Pilot and now called the Electronic Employer Verification System. They have checked 1.77 million employees, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within the Homeland Security Department.
Current immigration law leaves it to employers to verify that they are hiring legal workers. But that law, passed in 1986, has not been enforced strictly. Immigration legislation pending in the Senate would require that Social Security numbers, identification and other information supplied by all U.S. workers be run through the electronic system. If the proposal becomes law, employers would have to check all new hires within 18 months of its enactment, and check all other employees within three years.
That could mean millions more employers logging on to a system that, right now, is still under development. “I just don’t think this is a realistic approach,” said Susan R. Meisinger, president of the Society for Human Resource Management, a suburban Washington-based association of human resources professionals. To get to all new hires in a year, she said, the Homeland Security Department would have to sign up 20,000 employers a day. There are an estimated 7 million to 8 million employers and 140 million employees in the U.S., business and labor officials say. Under the Senate proposal, employers who have illegal workers on the payroll could face fines from $5,000 per worker to up to $75,000 and six months in jail per worker.
Screening proponents say the requirement is needed because too many employers are hiring illegal immigrants, whether knowingly or unwittingly. The worker check system can’t verify the accuracy of all information submitted to an employer, including drivers licenses and state identification cards obtained with stolen or borrowed birth certificates. That was a problem for the pork and beef processor Swift & Co., which had been using the system for 10 years when its six plants were raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year. More than 1,200 immigrant workers were arrested; Swift itself wasn’t charged.
Di Ann Sanchez, vice president of human resources at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, anticipates a bottleneck when the airport has to ensure its 1,800 employees are legal — even those employed for decades. “If you’ve got all these employers hitting that system, is the system reliable to do it and not come back with a false negative or be so overloaded that it won’t allow employers to hire as quickly as we need to?” Sanchez said.
