It wasn’t the typical rapid reaction that has become a staple of Washington life since Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.
Usually in political combat, the advocates on opposing sides of an issue attack and counterattack within the same news cycle, sometimes within the same hour.
It took Rep. Ken Calvert, R-California, two days to push back against a coalition of HR groups, led by the Society for Human Resource Management, that wants to replace the government-run electronic employment verification system that he authored, E-Verify.
In a hearing on Tuesday, May 6, the HR Initiative for a Legal Workforce was among critics that called E-Verify inefficient, prone to error and incapable of detecting identity fraud.
In an announcement released late on Thursday, May 8, Calvert’s office called on the organization “to end their campaign of negative advertising and often exaggerated claims against E-Verify.”
On May 6, the coalition led the charge for a bill written by Sen. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, that would replace E-Verify with a new electronic verification mechanism and eliminate the I-9 process.
Companies would be required to submit new-hire information to the Social Security Administration through a child-support enforcement system that about 90 percent of U.S. employers use. But before that happens, the Social Security database would be cleaned up through a congressional appropriation.
The problem with E-Verify, opponents argue, is that it relies on the current database, which has a 4.1 percent error rate and could mistakenly declare millions of people ineligible for employment. They also say that the Johnson bill avoids many other E-Verify deficiencies.
At the hearing, Calvert defended his creation, testifying that 92 percent of employees put into the system are immediately approved and less than 1 percent successfully contest a nonconfirmation.
About 61,000 employers voluntarily use E-Verify. The law that established the system expires in November. Calvert has introduced a bill that would reauthorize it and mandate that all 7.4 million employers sign up over a seven-year period.
Most of the input at the hearing came from people who were concerned that such an expansion of E-Verify would overwhelm the Social Security system.
After mulling it over for a couple days, Calvert issued a pointed statement on Thursday.
“While I appreciated the opportunity to testify, it was clear that the hearing, as evidenced by the second witness panel, was slanted against E-Verify,” he said. “The fact remains that E-Verify is the only tool available for employers, who are required to hire a legal workforce, to check the veracity of identification documents presented by a new employee.”
Then the shot across SHRM’s bow: “There are certain interests that simply do not want employment verification. That is why they will denounce E-Verify and assert that there is a perfect system out there somewhere, when in fact there is no perfect system.”
But SHRM is standing its ground. The world’s largest HR organization has never said it is against verification; but it will continue to oppose the current government system.
“Our opinions are not politically motivated,” says SHRM president and CEO Sue Meisinger. “They are based on what our members say. We think there’s a better way than E-Verify.”
The disagreement between SHRM and Calvert may intensify as November, and E-Verify’s expiration date, approaches.
War and medical metaphors tend to dominate Washington parlance. For instance, partisans are constantly “attacking” someone else’s position or “defending” their own.
Sometimes, one side “inoculates” against an attack by doing something that is meant to neutralize the opposition’s argument.
On the eve of a hearing on employer verification that will kick off a renewed Capitol Hill focus on immigration policy, the Department of Homeland Security announced improvements to its electronic employer verification system on Monday, May 5.
The DHS program, known as E-Verify, has come under withering criticism from employers and HR organizations. The voluntary system, which has been in place since 1997 and now boasts 64,000 participating companies, checks information from I-9 forms against databases at the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.
The Society for Human Resource Management and several other HR groups charge that E-Verify is inefficient, prone to error and incapable of being ramped up to handle traffic from all 6 million employers in the country. They cite statistics from a study showing that the Social Security database, upon which E-Verify relies, has a 4.1 percent error rate, which could amount to 6 million people being denied employment by mistake.
So, in typical Washington fashion, the DHS decides to inoculate against such criticism by unveiling two enhancements to the system the day before a Tuesday, May 6, House Ways & Means subcommittee hearing on employer verification.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a division of the DHS, will add naturalization data to E-Verify in order to augment the Social Security databases. It also will allow nonconfirmed workers to resolve mismatches directly with the USCIS rather than going through the Social Security Administration.
“Naturalized citizens who have not yet updated their records with the Social Security Administration are the largest category of work-authorized persons who initially face an SSA mismatch in E-Verify,” the USCIS said in a statement.
The agency also said real-time arrival data from the border inspection system will be added to E-Verify in an effort to reduce mismatches for newly arrived workers.
The improvements are unlikely to assuage SHRM and the other members of the HR Initiative for a Legal Workforce. They are advocating a bill written by Sen. Sam Johnson, R-Texas and ranking member of the House Ways & Means Social Security subcommittee.
Johnson’s measure would mandate that employers submit information electronically only for new hires to the Social Security Administration through a child-support enforcement system already in place in each state.
Advocates for the bill say that about 90 percent of U.S. employers already use the so-called “dead-beat dad” system. The identity of prospective employees would be checked against Social Security and Department of Homeland Security databases. The procedure would eliminate the paper-based I-9 process.
Under the bill, employers would be given the option of signing up for a secure electronic verification system that uses a network of government-approved private contractors to conduct background checks of workers and collect biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints.
At the May 6 hearing, supporters of the Johnson bill will face off against champions of E-Verify. The meeting will launch House consideration of immigration proposals, many of which focus on enforcement.
The hearing series is an attempt by House Democratic leadership to satisfy conservative Democrats—and Republicans—who are pushing for a vote on bills that would crack down on illegal hiring.
Top House Democrats don’t want to allow enforcement measures to move forward without including bills to increase legal immigration and to allow a path toward naturalization for the 12 million illegal workers in the United States.
But the immigration logjam may have to be broken when it comes to E-Verify. The law that established the program expires in November. Congress has to either extend E-Verify or scrap it this year.
At the risk of looking like a walking cliché, I am reading The World is Flat during a personal trip to India. And not just to India, but to Bangalore, the IT haven that inspired author Tom Friedman’s catchy title.
I decided a couple years ago that I had to get at least a glimpse of each place. I traveled to Shanghai in March 2006 and am in Bangalore now.
What I am offering is not academic analysis but my impression of India in the first days of my first trip to the country. After reading the beginning of Friedman’s book, I was expecting that Bangalore would be a mecca that rivals U.S. cities.
Maybe that’s what I’ll see later in IT office parks. But the images here that strike me are the paradoxes that infuse most developing countries. Expensive sports cars compete for the road with the teeming auto rickshaws.
I am staying in one of the “posh” sections of town with a friend. But a couple blocks over, a Louis Vuitton store is about to open on a dilapidated street.
On tours of the city, it is clear that many of the people here—perhaps a majority—live in abject poverty. Their neighborhoods aspire to step up to gritty. Your heart goes out to those who are battling such grinding poverty while making less than $2 a day.
Of course, I know that there is another large section of the town that is thriving in an IT boom. I am staying down the street from a call center. I see the workers there coming and going. Every day in the paper, there are stories about IT companies making billions of dollars and expanding their operations.
One of the primary reasons they can do this is because of a talented technology workforce. Many of the world’s best engineers and scientists come from India. Even in the first few days here, I can tell India is a society that values education.
Colleges dot the landscape. Billboards call out for people to enroll in courses. All around Bangalore, I get the feeling that education is seen as central to advancement.
Many thousands of Indian students also come to U.S. universities.
U.S. computer programmers complain that H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants reduce wages and job opportunities. That could be true.
But there’s another subtle argument that employers are making: By and large, foreign-national students are more talented and numerous than their U.S. counterparts.
Leaving aside whether that quality assessment is fair, there doesn’t seem to be any excuse for U.S. workers not to compete effectively with those from India. For one thing, Americans have a tremendous head start.
In the Bangalore area, down the street from signs encouraging enrollment in local universities often is a neighborhood that illustrates the dire economic straits of most Indians.
Just look at the numbers. The literacy rate in the U.S. is 99 percent. In India, it’s 60 percent. There’s 54 percent enrollment in Indian secondary schools, compared with 94 percent in the United States.
After seeing Bangalore for a couple days, it’s clear to me that a kid from a randomly selected American family has a much better foundation for success than a child from a randomly selected Indian family.
The complex and difficult task Washington must tackle involves reforming education and workforce development policies so that more Americans take advantage of the country’s blessings to become the talent that U.S. companies crave.
Usually one of the first casualties of an election year is substantive accomplishments on Capitol Hill. Although legislation suffers, politics thrives. This atmosphere can be a catalyst for bills that have a better chance of making a political point than becoming law. This is the case with immigration. A broad Senate bill that would have strengthened border and workplace enforcement while providing a path toward legalization for undocumented workers that many industries desperately need died almost a year ago.Since then, the immigration issue has become volatile and brittle. Passions tend to cause internal divisions in parties and split interest groups into strange-bedfellow arrangements.Although a comprehensive bill won’t rise out of this political cauldron, many rifle-shot bills could bubble to the surface in the coming weeks. For instance, a measure written by Rep. Heath Shuler, D-North Carolina, has garnered 146 co-sponsors, most of whom are Republicans.
Shuler’s bill focuses solely on enforcement. It cracks down on illegal workplace hiring by mandating that all companies use E-Verify, a government-run electronic verification system that 52,000 employers now use voluntarily.
Employers enter information from I-9 forms into the system, which then checks it against government databases at the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.
E-Verify is reviled by many in the HR community. They cite its 4 percent error rate, criticizing it for being inefficient, ineffective and prone to errors that could ultimately cause an economic disruption if all employers use the system.
As an alternative to E-Verify, the Society for Human Resource Management and other HR organizations have worked with Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, to write a bill called the New Employee Verification Act. It has 13 Republican co-sponsors.
The measure would establish a mandatory electronic verification system based on existing new-hire databases in each state. Those databases were originally constructed to track fathers who skirted child support payments. The system would replace I-9 forms, allowing employers to enter information directly or over the phone.
Like the Shuler bill, the Johnson legislation would impose civil penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants. But the Johnson bill would not hold companies responsible for hiring done by subcontractors and would only require verification of new hires rather than the entire workforce.
The Johnson bill has not yet attracted a Democratic co-sponsor because Democratic leadership is discouraging caucus members from signing on to rifle-shot measures.
Shuler has been able to line up many Democrats from conservative districts because his bill gives them an outlet to prove they are tough on immigration.
But Democratic leaders also are wary of Shuler’s proposal because it’s essentially a Republican vehicle. The bill’s supporters are circulating a “discharge petition,” a document that would send a bill directly to the floor for a vote if it collects 218 signatures. The Shuler petition has 181 so far.
While immigration intrigue unfolds in the House, Senate Republicans have introduced 15 immigration enforcement bills. One of them, written by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, would establish an electronic verification system based on E-Verify. Under quirky Senate rules, Sessions likely will have an opportunity to force votes on his package.
If Shuler and Sessions get the floor action they seek, it will be difficult for any member of Congress—Republican or Democratic—to come out against workplace verification. The question is whether they will be voting for E-Verify or the SHRM-backed system, if Johnson can develop enough support for his bill or get it inserted into Shuler’s bill.
On top of all these political machinations is another important factor. The law that created E-Verify expires in November. One way or another, Congress has to do something on employment verification soon, even though it’s an election year.
Recently, presidential front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, stumbled on the topic of immigration. In a debate, she tripped over a question about whether she supported a plan by the New York governor to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.
She basically said “yes” and “no,” drawing fierce criticism from her opponents for flip-flopping. That issue is now somewhat academic because Gov. Elliott Spitzer has withdrawn the idea. But policy toward immigration is still roiling Democrats. Just look at developments in the last couple weeks on Capitol Hill.
Earlier this month, Rep. Heath Shuler, D-North Carolina, introduced a bill that would increase the number of Border Patrol agents, enhance work-site enforcement and strengthen the investigative power of immigration and customs officers. It also would force every U.S. employer to adopt the controversial electronic government verification system called E-Verify, formerly known as Basic Pilot.
The bipartisan bill has 112 co-sponsors—45 Democrats and 67 Republicans. It likely won’t go anywhere before the end of this session of Congress in December 2008 because failure of an immigration bill earlier this year in the Senate has halted the issue.
But the Shuler bill does provide a sense of where Congress is on the issue. Many of the Democrats on Shuler’s bill are from districts similar to the ex-professional quarterback’s home region. They are rural and conservative. The members occupying those seats are the vanguard of the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill. They’re not bashful about distancing themselves from their party’s front-runner on immigration.
The fact that they are embracing an enforcement-only bill is indicative of how difficult—if not impossible—it will be to move forward on immigration before next year’s election. If you’re in favor of cracking down on illegal employment, you’re not going to countenance any kind of guest worker system and path to citizenship for undocumented workers.
An example is Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Indiana, who defeated one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress last year, former Rep. John Hostettler. Ellsworth used to be sheriff in Vanderburgh County, which encompasses Evansville. He was given one of the first speaking roles at the Shuler bill press conference so that he could emphasize the law-and-order dimension of the measure.
But even if the Shuler legislation is approved first, Ellsworth indicated that he would be leery of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that many of his more liberal colleagues—and most of the business community—support.
In an interview after the press conference, he said that he wants to improve the legal immigration system to make it more efficient. But his message to those who are already here was clear. “You can go home and start over,” he said. “Go home, apply and do it the right way.”
This week, Ellsworth and seven Democratic House colleagues traveled to the Mexican border to tour customs facilities. One of the people in the delegation was Rep. Niki Tsongas, D-Massachusetts.
She just barely won a recent special election. Her GOP opponent effectively used the immigration issue against her and came within 4 percent in a district that has 14 percent Republican registration. It’s no wonder that one of Tsongas’ first trips highlighted a get-tough attitude on immigration.
Ellsworth calls immigration one of the biggest concerns on constituents’ minds. He said, “I was getting a flu shot and a lady came up and said, ‘When are you going to do something [about illegal immigration]?”
As Ellsworth demonstrates, many Democrats in competitive districts are starting to sound like most Republicans on immigration. That means that it will be harder to achieve immigration policies that most executives and HR professionals want to see—a verification system that overhauls or scraps E-Verify, and a path to citizenship that will keep illegal immigrants in the U.S. labor market.
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