House OKs Three-Year Extension of E-Verify Program
With action on comprehensive immigration reform pushed off to next year, the House approved a homeland security funding bill on Thursday, October 15, that would renew a government-run electronic employment verification system.
A provision to extend the mechanism, known as E-Verify, for three years was included in a $42.8 billion appropriations measure the House approved, 307-114, that would fund the Department of Homeland Security for the next fiscal year.
The bill was a product of House-Senate negotiations and is expected to be approved by the Senate.
It allocates $137 million to improve E-Verify’s accuracy and compliance rates and $135 million for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hire special agents for workplace immigration audits.
During bicameral talks last week, Senate amendments that would have permanently authorized E-Verify and would have codified a regulation that makes E-Verify mandatory for federal contractors were dropped.
The decisions cool for now a simmering debate over the effectiveness of E-Verify.
“There’s no consensus on making it permanent, and no interest in tackling this as a stand-alone issue with the prospect of a more wide-ranging debate on comprehensive immigration reform looming in the future,” says Eric Bord, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Washington.
The mechanism, which checks employee information from I-9 forms against Social Security and homeland security databases, is used voluntarily by more than 148,000 employers.
Groups such as the Society for Human Resource Management have criticized the system for being inefficient, ineffective and unable to detect identity theft. They say that mistakes in government records could cause hundreds of thousands of legal workers to be declared ineligible.
A provision to extend the mechanism, known as E-Verify, for three years was included in a $42.8 billion appropriations measure the House approved, 307-114, that would fund the Department of Homeland Security for the next fiscal year.
The bill was a product of House-Senate negotiations and is expected to be approved by the Senate.
It allocates $137 million to improve E-Verify’s accuracy and compliance rates and $135 million for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hire special agents for workplace immigration audits.
During bicameral talks last week, Senate amendments that would have permanently authorized E-Verify and would have codified a regulation that makes E-Verify mandatory for federal contractors were dropped.
The decisions cool for now a simmering debate over the effectiveness of E-Verify.
“There’s no consensus on making it permanent, and no interest in tackling this as a stand-alone issue with the prospect of a more wide-ranging debate on comprehensive immigration reform looming in the future,” says Eric Bord, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Washington.
The mechanism, which checks employee information from I-9 forms against Social Security and homeland security databases, is used voluntarily by more than 148,000 employers.
Groups such as the Society for Human Resource Management have criticized the system for being inefficient, ineffective and unable to detect identity theft. They say that mistakes in government records could cause hundreds of thousands of legal workers to be declared ineligible.
posted by John @ 9:52 PM
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