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US President George Bush has signed an executive order requiring contractors and other employers who do business with the federal government to use an electronic system to check the legal status of foreign workers.
Called E-Verify, the Web-based system is a government tool created to crack down on illegal workers in the United States. According to US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, over 1,000 employers a week are signing up to use the system.
"A large part of our success in enforcing the nation's immigration laws hinges on equipping employers with the tools to determine quickly and effectively if a worker is legal or illegal," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
"E-Verify is a proven tool that helps employers immediately verify the legal working status for all new hires," he added.
In addition to Bush's executive order concerning federal contractors, a number of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regulations were published in the last few months that require employers to register with E-Verify before obtaining "certain benefits".
One such benefit allows employers to hire foreign students under F-1 visas who have obtained a 17-month extension under the Optional Practical Training program(OPT). OPT allows students to work in the US in a field related to their studies. F-1 students under this extension can only work for employers registered with the system.
In addition, a proposed rule would only allow an H-2A foreign agricultural worker to change employers if the new employer is registered with E-Verify.
According to the DHS, over 69,000 US employers are using E-Verify, most of them voluntarily and some required to do so by local and state governments. So far in fiscal year 2008, more than 4 million employment verification queries have been submitted.
Of those queries, DHS noted, 99.5 percent of "qualified employees" were cleared automatically.
However, the system still has its detractors. Immigration advocates and business groups say that E-Verify relies on faulty databases that were never designed to handle immigration enforcement work. In many cases, a name change or citizenship status could cause a mismatch in existing records, causing the system to reject the worker.
