Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Thumbs-Up for E-Verify   [Mark Krikorian]

Harry Reid did not permit the Senate version of the "stimulus" to have the House version's E-Verify provisions in it, so it's up to the conferees to decide whether they will be in the final bill. (See Rep. Lamar Smith's letter urging the conferees to include E-Verify here.) One thing that should weigh in favor of the House version is the endorsement of E-Verify by Doris Meissner, Bill Clinton's INS commissioner and a fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, which is basically the Obama Administration's policy shop for immigration. A report co-authored by her, released today, is a mixed bag, with lots of suggestions to gut enforcement, but also this:

Mandatory employer verification must be at the center of legislation to combat illegal immigration. Until such legislation is enacted, the administration should support reauthorization of the E-Verify employment verification system and expand its use as a voluntary program, allowing for its steady improvement in moving to scale as a mandatory program. Attention should now be focused on continued improvement in the accuracy rates of the DHS and SSA databases, development of a secure system of identification, and improved rates of employer compliance with program rules. Also, the administration should analyze whether or not E-Verify ultimately offers the best platform for mandatory verification.

It gets a little weasely at the end there, but not bad for Democrats. If Reid and Pelosi do strip the E-Verify provisions from the bill, they'd give Republicans an easy-to-explain reason to vote no: "The Democratic leadership rejected bipartisan measures to ensure that the jobs created would go only to Americans and legal immigrants, and we're not going to mortgage our great-grandchildren's future to create jobs for 300,000 illegal aliens."

02/11 05:56 PMShare