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.
Last fall, I had the privilege of visiting Ukraine when the country was holding its parliamentary elections. The colorful campaigns—and a general lack of faith among the middle-class Ukrainians I met that the process would improve their lives—offered special insight into the country.
My electoral timing is good again on my current trip to India. Karnataka, the state in which Bangalore is located, will hold elections May 10. The emphasis that India puts on education as a key to growth is evident from the campaign manifesto released by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
In that document, the party pledges to establish cyber-cafes in every village. The goal is to take the IT energy evident in Bangalore to the countryside. Based on the number of billboards in rural areas advertising computer and business classes, it is clear that plugging poor—often destitute—people into IT prosperity is a priority.
The national government also is getting in on the act. Over the weekend, Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said that if the country puts as much effort into human capital development as it does into attracting investment and increasing productivity, it could add 1 percent to 2 percent to the country’s already rapid annual growth rate.
One program under way is the National Skill Development Mission, which is designed to help prepare Indian students for the job abilities they’ll need beyond what they get through classroom instruction. Chidambaram also said the country must increase the number of primary school students entering college from the current 11.6 percent to the world average of 23.2 percent, or the developed-country average of 54 percent.
In addition to this activity, the Indian Human Resource Development Ministry announced on April 20 that all central educational institutions should offer reservations for positions in upcoming courses to members of “Other Backward Classes.” This mandate is the result of an Indian Supreme Court order to increase educational opportunities for poor Indians.
Now, apply simple math to these moves and you see the talent potential in India. After visiting the country for even a day, you notice that there is no one-child policy here, as there is in China. Kids are ubiquitous. The Indian population is estimated to hit 1.2 billion by 2011.
In a country this huge, there already are big and growing middle and upper classes. From those strata, India is producing some of the world’s top engineers and scientists, many of whom graduate from U.S. colleges and universities. When lower-income Indians are given a better chance to join their ranks, there will be even more young professionals in Bangalore eager to take advantage of the country’s proliferating IT opportunities.
Almost every 20- or 30-something Indian I met during my weeklong visit to Bangalore had some kind of IT job—and so do some of the American expats I encountered. U.S. companies will continue expanding operations here. In a visit to Bangalore on April 24, Accenture CEO William Green said the company intends to increase employment in its Indian operations to 50,000 from 37,000 within a year.
These developments present an opportunity for the United States. For Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Dell and dozens of other U.S. companies, India is source of innovation and a growing market. The products and profits they generate here are good for the United States.
But the U.S. must also meet the challenge posed by India’s strong talent pool. U.S. students must be prepared not only to work harder in school but also learn how to be more creative in science, engineering and all other disciplines. It’s the best way for America to maintain its edge in global competition.
Of course, the U.S. also is in the midst of an election season. It would be refreshing to hear our candidates, from the presidential to congressional and state levels, engage in an intelligent dialogue about how the country could improve its educational and workforce development systems to help all Americans participate—and prosper—in the global economy.
Instead, we’re subject to their efforts to score political points by trashing trade liberalization and touting tax cuts. A challenge—and opportunity—of the magnitude represented by India requires a thoughtful political debate. There’s still plenty of time to have one.
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.
Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama created a political firestorm when he waxed philosophical at a San Francisco fundraiser about the plight of the working class—a group of Americans under constant threat of job loss.
“It’s not surprising that they get a little bitter; they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment,” he was quoted as saying.
Leaving aside the potential offense the remarks could give to people whose faith or firearms are genuinely important to them, Obama may be on to something when he says that many American workers are bitter.
But it’s unlikely their economic fears are assuaged by what they hear from presidential candidates, including Obama, or from elected officials. Helping those who have been left behind by global economic competition and technological advancement requires a complex policy approach based on management, labor and government cooperation.
It will take the combined efforts of those three entities—along with presidential leadership—to modernize U.S. workforce training programs, streamline health care and wage assistance for displaced workers, and develop a portable benefits system so workers don’t lose their safety net when they lose their jobs.
These issues deserve a prominent place in political discourse. They’re not getting it. True, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi halted the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, a top priority for President Bush, in order to “put the leverage back into the hands of America’s working families” and force Bush to consider Democratic economic proposals.
Chief among them is an expansion of Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers who are adversely affected by trade. Another is a second economic stimulus package that focuses on an extension of unemployment benefits.
But when Pelosi and Bush tangle, they usually fight over Bush’s insistence on making his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent. Democrats say they are a sop for the wealthy.
Bush only brings up Trade Adjustment Assistance when he is looking for support for trade agreements. The administration has shown little interest in it otherwise. But Democrats tend to talk more about cushioning the hurt of unemployment than they do about how to help all workers—including those who already have jobs—improve their skills and their standard of living.
On the campaign trail, Obama has devoted at least one speech to workforce training. But the rest of the time, he stokes worker anger about tough economic times rather than outline ways to help them move their career arc higher. He’s consistently pitting workers against management.
“What we can’t do is sign trade deals that put the interests of multinational corporations ahead of the interests of our workers or our environment,” Obama said in an April 15 speech before building trade unions.
In reality, international companies depend on a strong workforce. The firms’ success is inextricably linked to their employees’ success—and for that matter, unions’ success. Despite his rhetoric about uniting management and labor, Obama rarely explores how to leverage that relationship for the good of the economy and individuals.
Sen. John McCain is not necessarily providing much hope for struggling workers either. In a major speech on economic policy April 15, he concentrated on tax breaks—an issue that won’t bring immediate comfort to those whose factory is moving to Mexico or China.
He did outline worker retraining and unemployment insurance reforms. But those policies came up in paragraphs 33 through 35 of a 43-paragraph speech. People who are worried about how to improve their skills to get a better job had to wait a while for McCain to get around to them.
Bush, Pelosi, Obama and McCain could do a better job of addressing workers’ fears.
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