The Key To Effective Immigration Reform- Fact of the Day

As the debate on immigration reform moves to the Senate floor, the nation’s leading human resource experts have outlined significant shortcomings in current proposals to strengthen employment verification – a key to effective immigration reform.

• Mandating an Inaccurate System – A debacle will result if legislation mandates all U.S. employers to use the current electronic system, the Basic Pilot, without first ensuring accuracy of the underlying government databases upon which it relies.

• Encouraging Identity Theft – Creating a reliable mandatory electronic employment verification system is a step in the right direction. However, it will not detect cases of identity theft, encouraging unauthorized workers to engage in identity theft to get jobs.

• Imposing Unworkable Re-verification – Several proposals would require all employers to re-verify the identity and employment eligibility of all employees. Over 149 million Americans are currently employed. If all employers must re-verify every existing worker, the burden on the government and the private sector will cause the new system to collapse. 

• Misusing the Social Security System – All proposals require verification of the social security number, which is appropriate.  But many proposals will turn the Social Security Administration into an identity management agency by adding enforcement activities.  These steps will add vast administrative and financial burdens that will interfere with the administration and distribution of benefits to Americans.

• Unfairly Assigning Liability - Some proposals would create liability for the actions of subcontractors or contractors even if the firm using the contract labor or service lacks actual knowledge or control of the contractor’s employment practices.

These are just some examples of unwise and unworkable proposals that have been presented to Congress.  They impose huge new burdens but will not provide employers with the certainty they need to maintain a legal workforce and to manage their human resources effectively.

The HR Initiative for a Legal Workforce advocates giving employers the tools they need by establishing a new, voluntary electronic employment verification system that would verify identity through the use of state-of-the-art technology, additional background checks and the potential use of biometric enrollment conducted by government certified private vendors. 

Preventing Unauthorized Employment is the Key to Effective Immigration Reform

The Human Resource Initiative for a Legal Workforce (www.legal-workforce.org) represents human resource professionals in thousands of small and large U.S. employers representing every sector of the American economy. The HR Initiative and its members are seeking to improve the current process of employment verification by creating a secure, efficient and reliable system that will ensure a legal workforce and help prevent unauthorized employment, a root cause of illegal immigration.