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.

Jock Scharfen, deputy director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told Congress last month that a recent study found the system could not initially confirm eight of every 100 people checked. Not all of those who were not confirmed are illegal workers. Sometimes the system flags naturalized citizens whose citizenship status hasn’t been updated, or women who didn’t change their names on Social Security records when they married. Confirmations are returned to employers in about three seconds, Scharfen said. The Senate bill allows up to three business days for initial responses to queries and 10 business days to confirm whether the worker is legal.

Chris Bentley, spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency is “confident the foundation has been laid so there can be rapid expansion of the program as needed.” The system has given accurate and timely responses to the 800 branches of Long Island, N.Y.-based Adecco Group North America, a firm that helps companies find temporary and contract workers, said Bernadette Kenny, senior vice president for human resources. Kenny, however, is not confident that will continue when more employers are using the system. “The current proposals do not seem to account for the huge technology or infrastructure support that would be needed to expand it,” Kenny said. “If you added every employer in America, even in my simple mind, without greatly expanding that platform, it would crash.”

Employers now collect information from the I-9 forms filled out by every U.S. worker when they are hired. They submit the information, usually name, birth date, Social Security number and citizenship or immigration status to the Internet-based system. A Social Security database is checked to verify the person is a citizen. Noncitizens’ information is checked with a Homeland Security immigration database. Anyone whose status can’t be verified has eight days to call a toll free number and can’t be fired or have adverse employment action taken against him. DHS said it usually resolves such cases in three business days. Critics are skeptical that Homeland Security can set up an employer verification system to handle all workers in four years. They note the agency has postponed a system to track foreigners entering and leaving the country. Homeland officials are testing a program now with about 50 employers that will allow checks of photos on green cards, used by legal permanent residents, to verify identities. The Senate proposal also calls for testing a system in which employers would submit workers’ fingerprints.

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States and municipalities are responding in wildly different ways to undocumented workers. Gustavo Torres is a popular guy these days. As he walks into the storefront worker center he runs, the Hispanic men and women who fill the waiting room wave and call out “buenos días.” Torres’ nonprofit has been hired by Montgomery County, Md., to provide employment services to these immigrants, about 60% of whom are in the country illegally.

The county pays Torres’ group, casa of Maryland Inc., about $700,000 a year to provide hiring halls, English language classes, and legal help in employment disputes. What’s more, the county doesn’t care what the federal government thinks of its welcoming attitude. “The local government says they are not going to cooperate with [U.S.] Immigration & Customs Enforcement,” says Torres.

It’s a different world just three hours away in Hazelton, Pa. The local government there is trying to push through ordinances meant to drive illegal immigrants out of town and punish employers who hire them. “Illegal immigration is destroying the quality of life,” says Hazelton Mayor Louis J. Barletta.

This stark contrast is repeated again and again across the country, confounding businesses with local rules designed to deal with an undocumented population estimated at 12 million nationwide. The federal government’s often haphazard enforcement of immigration laws and the absence of a comprehensive immigration policy only adds to the confusion. “This is like a Bermuda Triangle,” says Di Ann Sanchez, vice-president of human resources at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in Texas.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, more than 80 immigration-related laws were enacted in 32 states in 2006; most of those measures were attempts to crack down on illegal immigrants. Wyoming, for example, enacted a law in 2005 that changed the state’s definition of “employee” to mean someone an employer believes to be a citizen or permanent resident at the date of hire. That same year, Kentucky passed a law requiring proof of citizenship to obtain certain professional licenses. In Georgia a 2006 law forces employers to accept only identification from states that don’t issue ids to illegal immigrants, a law that clashes with the federal mandate that employers accept driver’s licenses from all 50 states as valid ID. “Which law do you obey?” says Bob Thomas, executive director of the Roofing & Sheet Metal Contractors Association of Georgia.

CAMPAIGN PRESSURE
Other areas are welcoming immigrants. New Haven, for one, plans to offer a city identification card that undocumented workers may use to access city services. And in addition to the one in Montgomery County, Md., there are 62 sanctioned day-labor centers in 17 states, according to a 2006 study.

Hazelton, Pa., took a different approach last summer when its mayor pushed ordinances intended to crack down on illegal immigration. The city was sued last August by the American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of local residents and business owners who argued that the city was trampling on the federal government’s domain over immigration. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sided with the aclu. A judge blocked enforcement of the ordinances while the case is under way.

Meanwhile, many businesses still hold out hope that the new Congress can pass an immigration bill that includes a guest worker program and a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants. But the politics of the 2008 Presidential campaign will make that difficult, business and political leaders say. If Congress can’t pass a bill by the fall, before the campaign begins in earnest, changes likely won’t come until 2009.

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