Immigration Law

CATO: E-VERIFY NUMBERS JUST DON'T ADD UP

By Greg Siskind

The Cato Institute's Jim Harper has been effectively challenging the Department of Homeland Security's assertion that the false positive rate with the E-Verify program is negligible. Here is Harper's latest analysis:

Yesterday at a meeting of the DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, a new data point opened a small window onto the situation of the 5.3%. To review, 94.2% of the workers submitted to the system are confirmed as eligible for work within 24 hours. Of the 5.8% tentatively nonconfirmed, .5% successfully contest their nonconfirmations, leaving us with 5.3% who receive final nonconfirmations for reasons yet unknown.

Staff of the DHS? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau reported yesterday that they had recently added a ?doublecheck? on tentative nonconfirmations, asking employers to review the data they had entered for errors. During the two months this has been in place, it has lowered the tentative nonconfirmation rate by 30%. That?s right - 30% of the tentative nonconfirmations had been caused by employers? fat fingers. (?Fat fingers? is not a knock on employers? fitness - it?s a techie term for data entry errors.)

If we assume that the figures recited above are from a period before the new fat-finger doublecheck, the 5.8% tentative nonconfirmation rate should have dropped 1.74% since the double-check was implemented. Next, assume (generously) that all of the .5% successfully contesting their tentative nonconfirmations were part of this cohort - the victims of employers? fat fingers. This leaves 1.24% of workers submitted to E-Verify during this period who were eligible to work but victims of employers? data entry errors - and who failed to contest their nonconfirmations.

There is plenty of room for error in this extrapolation, and I?ll happily publish refinements or corrections to what I?ve written here, but it looks like more than 1 in 100 employees are tentatively nonconfirmed by E-Verify and go on to final nonconfirmation even though they are eligible to work under the immigration laws. That?s a huge percentage considering that millions of Americans? employability is on the line. The burden is on DHS and other proponents of electronic employment eligibility verification to figure out what?s going on and to fix it.

Some of the folks in the comments have been challenging my assertion that employers will have to fire workers if they are unable to resolve their problems in 8 days. Let me clarify how E-Verify works. If an employer receives a tentative non-confirmation notice, the worker is to be notified and given eight days to resolve the problem with the Social Security Administation of DHS. After ten days the employer is to run the employee's name again through E-Verify. The employer will either get a confirmation, a final non-confirmation or notice that SSA or DHS is still working on it. DHS and SSA are using ten days as the target to finish processing in each case where there is an initial non-confirmation. That means that in the vast majority of cases, ten days is the limit and then the employee must be terminated. While it is true that DHS or SSA could keep a matter open and en employer cannot terminate while that is going on, these are not the people I'm concerned as much about. I'm talking about the 1% or more that Jim Harper is mentioning - people who get an incorrect final nonconfirmation and who are terminated after ten days despite the fact that they still are trying to get the problem corrected. As Harper notes, 1% is an enormous percentage and could have devastating effects on many Americans.

Full post as published by Greg Siskind's Blog on June 15, 2008 (boomark / email).