Op-ed: How E-Verify can be outsmarted, and how Congress can fix it

E-Verify is an online system that’s supposed to prevent illegal aliens from getting hired. Even though it’s voluntary for employers, it has shown itself to be quite effective. But recent high-profile failures, including the hiring of an illegal alien as a police officer in Maine, have raised questions about the system.

The problem turns out to be not E-Verify but identity theft. And Congress can fix it.

Congress created E-Verify in 1996 to give employers a reliable method of checking the work authorization of new employees. The widespread availability of fraudulent documents had thoroughly undermined the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986’s purely paper-based “I-9” process, requiring employers to check the identity and work-authorization documents of new hires.

While still largely voluntary, E-Verify has grown dramatically, verifying over 43 million employees last year. And it has been highly successful, denying employment to 849,914 aliens not authorized to work in the past four years. When E-Verify is mandatory, it “can have very large deterrent effects on the employment of undocumented immigrants,” as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has concluded.

But despite its success, there have been periodic reports of E-Verify giving the green light to illegal immigrants and others (such as tourists) who don’t have the right to work. This summer, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested illegal aliens working at a Nebraska meatpacking plant, and a police department in Maine hired an illegal alien as a police officer, in both cases, after E-Verify gave the go-ahead.

At its core, E-Verify compares Social Security numbers against government records to flag employees providing fictitious numbers. But, as the consulting firm Westat concluded, new hires “may borrow documents belonging to relatives or friends, use stolen documents, or purchase valid documents that have been sold by the owner,” and “E-Verify cannot identify these documents as fraudulent since they are, in fact, genuine.”

As a congressional staffer, I drafted E-Verify’s legislative text in 1996, and I can certify that it was not designed to be impervious to identity theft. In fact, E-Verify would never have been enacted in the first place had it been so designed. For only a biometric national ID card, if even that, can make E-Verify completely identity-theft-proof. And a national ID card is a political third rail in American politics.

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[Read the rest at the Washington Examiner]