Report: E-Verify misses half of illegal workers

The problem here is two-fold. Ten apparently Mexican workers* come in for a job. Half of them may be legal US workers and half may be illegal. the machine may say 7 or 8 are legal and 2 or 3 are not. And you have no idea which are really which. And out of 100 workers, the machine may incorrectly identify 7 as illegal who actually are legal. Its a total crap shoot.

If they are serious about prevent the hiring of illegals they would have to use this system on every applicant so you can ignore the singling out of Mexicans in the preceding paragraph. I doubt they are that serious and are targeting Mexicans from the get go.

Anthony Bourdain (celebrity chef, author)

I'm in favor of amnesty, actually. Anthony Bourdain says half the cooks in NYC restaurants are from Mexico.

The system Congress and the Obama administration want employers to use to help curb illegal immigration is failing to catch more than half the number of unauthorized workers it checks, a research company has found.

The online tool E-Verify, now used voluntarily by employers, wrongly clears illegal workers about 54 percent of the time, according to Westat, a research company that evaluated the system for the Homeland Security Department [DHS]. E-Verify missed so many illegal workers mainly because it can't detect identity fraud, Westat said.

[snip]

E-Verify allows employers to run a worker's information against Homeland Security and Social Security databases to check whether the person is permitted to work in the U.S. The Obama administration has made cracking down on employers who hire people here illegally a central part of its immigration enforcement policy, and there are expectations that some Republicans in Congress will try in coming weeks to make E-Verify mandatory. [emphasis mine]

E-Verify correctly identified legal workers 93 percent of the time, Westat said. However, previous studies have not quantified how many immigrants were fooling the E-Verify system. Much of the criticism of E-Verify has focused on whether U.S. citizens and legal immigrants with permission to work were falsely flagged as illegal workers.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who is writing the Democrats' immigration bill and has fought expanding E-Verify because of its flaws, said Wednesday that the fact that E-Verify was inaccurate so often shows that it is not an adequate tool.

"This is a wake-up call to anyone who thinks E-Verify is an effective remedy to stop the hiring of illegal immigrants," Schumer said.

[snip]

About 184,000 of the nation's 7 million to 8 million employers are using E-Verify, the Homeland Security Department says on its Web site.

Congress gave DHS about $100 million to spend on E-Verify in its 2010 budget.

Oh, no problem. It only cost $100 million this year for these machines.

Finally, somehow the GOP is gonna find a way to tweak these numbers to justify spending more and making the machines mandatory.

* Based upon profiling (appearance) and accent.

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