NewsOK
SUZANNE GAMBOA
Published: February 25, 2010
WASHINGTON (AP) — The system Congress and the Obama administration want U.s. employers to use to help curb illegal immigration is failing to catch more than half of the 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. E-Verify missed so many illegal workers mainly because it can't detect identity fraud, Westat said.
"Clearly it means it's not doing its No. 1 job well enough," said Marc Rosenblum, a researcher at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
E-Verify allows employers to run a worker's information against Department of 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...
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Posted on
Thu, February 25, 2010
by Crystal Drwenski