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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Note: Headline links to source. Clicking on image will enlarge it (usually).

Checkpoint crazy: Border busts coming AND going

If they intend to deport them anyway, what's the fucking point? Oh yeah, they thrive on extra paperwork.

U.S. border authorities no longer apprehend illegal immigrants only as they enter the country. Now they're catching them on the way out. At random times near the Tijuana-San Diego border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers have been setting up checkpoints, boarding buses destined for Mexico and pulling off people who don't have proper documentation.

Note: Headline links to source.

U.S. farmers go where workers are: Mexico

There isn't really much to add to the original story except to point out something the story doesn't. The wages he's paying are being spent in Mexico whereas before most were sent to Mexico, but some were spent in California

Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.

Farming since he was a teenager, Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in California's Imperial Valley, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexicans and many probably in the United States illegally.

But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now, about 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.

"I'm as American red-blood as it gets," Scaroni said, "but I'm tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue."

...

While there are benefits for Mexico, as American farmers bring the latest technology and techniques to the rich soil of its northern regions, economists say that thousands of middle-class jobs supporting agriculture are being lost in the United States. Some lawmakers in the United States also point to security risks when food for Americans is increasingly produced in foreign countries.

...

Scaroni expects recover his start-up costs because of the lower wages he pays farm workers here, $11 a day as opposed to about $9 an hour in California, although Mexican workers are less productive in their own country, he said.

Obviously labor is cheaper in Mexico, but at peak season Scaroni employs 5,000 workers who spend that $55,000 in daily pay in Mexico.

Oh yeah, everybody is less productive in Mexico because of the heat.

Via International Herald Tribue.

They are people, people

Because of the "immigration law" attention I felt it time to recall a couple of older posts.

Story 1.

Story 2.

Story 3.

Boy asks Mexican Congress to lobby Washington to stop his mother's deportation

This is the true face of immigration law. There's much more to it.

Mexico's Congress was swayed Tuesday by a 7-year-old boy on a mission to save his mom.

Second-grader Saul Arellano, a U.S. citizen, appeared in Mexico's 500-member Chamber of Deputies to plead for help in lobbying Washington to stop the deportation of his mother, an illegal immigrant who has taken refuge in a Chicago church.

His efforts paid off with a resolution calling on the U.S. Congress to suspend the deportation of Elvira Arellano and any other illegal immigrant parents of U.S. citizens.

If the U.S. agrees, it would "create a precedent that will benefit more than 4.9 million children who have been born in the United States and whose parents live under the threat of deportation," said Mexican congressman Jose Jacques, who lived in the United States for 33 years and has an American daughter and granddaughter.

Flashing cameras and swarms of reporters surrounded the boy as he entered the chamber. Lawmakers rose from their seats to shake his hand. But instead of stepping to the podium, he was swept into a side room, where he hid his face and ducked under a table.

"I think being so small he was kind of freaked," family friend Jesus Carlin said.

Saul then took the microphone and spoke to reporters in Spanish, describing what he wanted from Mexico's lawmakers: "I want them to tell President Bush to end the deportations so that my mother and other families can stay together in the United States."

(read more)

U.S. speeds visas for Cuban doctors in other countries

Somehow this seems like supreme hypocrisy, that we'll accept Cuban trained doctors, but still belittle Fidel Castro's rule, but I can't put my finger on it. Or did I?

Hundreds of Cuban doctors and other medical personnel who defected in other countries have applied for fast-track entry into the United States under a 6-month-old special program, U.S. officials said.

More than 100 already have arrived in the United States under the program, and hundreds more are hiding in places such as Bolivia and Venezuela, awaiting U.S. background checks to ensure that they're medical professionals, not rights abusers or Cuban government agents.

After a slow start, the program, intended for Cuban medical personnel who defect while they're working abroad, has received so many applicants that Cuban-American activists are scrambling to assist the new arrivals. There are reports that Cuban authorities are visiting family members of doctors stationed abroad to warn them of reprisals if their relatives flee.

"It's a hugely successful program," said Emilio Gonzalez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security. "The word is getting out, and obviously we get an increased number every week."

(read more)

Rove on immigration

Why the hell is the administration spinning for Rove? He's of no use now that Bush has used up his rule-the-country tickets.

ABC News' Karen Travers Reports: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove explained the Bush Administration's guest worker program and immigration policy at a luncheon Thursday by saying, "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

...

Rove was not insulting those people in those jobs, the White House explained, he was, according to Perino, saying that every parent wants their child to have a high-skilled, high-wage job.

Uh OK, if that's what you say. But if I were Rove, I wouldn't expect nice smooth sheets in Las Vegas.

(read more)