E-Verify System Still Fraught With Problems

by Dave Bennion

Published November 30, 2008 @ 06:57PM PT

Greg Siskind links to a recent article about proposed local implementation of E-Verify in Oregon and voices his doubts that E-Verify is viable in its current form.

Jeff Rogers spent 21 years in the Air Force, working in military intelligence.

Yet the Arkansas native doubts he could pass muster under Columbia County's new voter-approved law requiring employers to check new hires' immigration status. A record-keeping discrepancy between his birth date and social security number would certainly come up, he said.

"I would come up as a mismatch," said Rogers, 55.

If the law creates problems for such a dyed-in the-wool American citizen, just imagine the problems that lie in store for anyone with a foreign accent, a green card or questionable documentation, said Rogers.

. . .

Rogers learned of the snafu when he went to file his federal taxes electronically this year, and the system kept kicking him out.

“Somewhere along the way, my birthdate got changed and it didn’t match up with my Social Security number,” he said. “You’d think with all my years in the military, they’d have me right.”

“You just need one digit wrong, and someone is no longer documentable,” said Marcy Westerling, a member of Rural Organizing Project, a grassroots human rights organization, which also opposed the measure. “We don’t have good systems in place to look at everyone’s paperwork. It just means that an employer is going to look twice at someone who might be hard to track. (The measure) is racial profiling, pure and simple.”

And Greg weighs in on the system:

I am not against continuing E-Verify. But I certainly want a system set up where a worker protesting the findings will have the right to continue working until the matter is resolved once and for all. Same for no match letters under the new rule. And for those who think I'm wrong regarding the protection of workers, the worker is only protected until DHS issues a final non-confirmation. But this is hardly adequate. An American worker should entitled to make his or her case in front of an independent judge. For those who think unlawfully present immigrants will take advantage, common sense says that someone illegally in the US is hardly likely to put themselves in such obvious jeopardy of detection and deportation.

More background on E-Verify here.