Excerpted Remarks by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Department of Commerce Secretary Gutierrez at the State of Immigration Address

One critical tool for our success is giving the employer the means to check whether the applicant for a job is in fact presenting a valid social security number and name that match what is in our government databases. And the tool used to do this is E-Verify. This system has been a tremendous success, and the proof of the pudding is the marketplace itself. Every week on average, about a thousand new employers join this program. And I will tell you that at this point, I will estimate that is almost -- maybe actually more than ten percent of the new hires being hired in the United States are currently being run through this E-Verify system.

We have almost 70,000 employers currently enrolled. The system works. Of those workers who are legal, 99.5 percent of them roughly are verified essentially instantaneously. And if those workers who have a mismatch -- legal workers who we estimate to be about a half a percent, they are able generally to resolve their issue within less than two days.