Archive for the ‘Immigration and Labor Markets’ Category

Observations about the Auto Bailout

Posted by Daniel Ikenson

Things went badly for Detroit’s automakers in Washington this week. What was to be a decisive lobbying blitz planned months in advance proved reminiscent of GM’s efforts to market the Chevy Nova in Latin America. Both were all show, no va!

The arguments against a bailout under any circumstances are well-established. A lot has been said and written lately, including this new piece, about the improprieties of so-called bailouts, generally, and in this case, specifically. Basically, we need a shakeout, not a bailout. What we’re witnessing is a shakedown.

Rather than emphasize those arguments here, there is a lot of subtext to this auto bailout frenzy. The subtext hasn’t received much attention, but is fascinating enough (to me at least) to write about.

Even before CorporateJetGate forced Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to bid the CEOs an abrupt and scathing adieu, support for Detroit’s case to raid the Treasury was melting away. But there wasn’t that much of a partisan divide over the issue. In fact, early October’s limited government, fiscal conservative darling, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), who gave one of the most compelling, moving, forceful, principled floor-speeches I’ve ever seen on the House floor in opposition to the financial bailout, is this month’s political hack. Apparently, his principled opposition to bailing out the “very people who caused this problem” doesn’t extend across state lines into Michigan. What a bitter disappointment he turns out to be.

The failure to garner enough support for a bailout bill was mostly the result of intra-party squabbling between factions within the Democratic Party — the Greens and the Laborites. The Greens view Detroit as carbon-belching heathens who must be brought to their knees before the almighty Sierra, Goddess of Flora and Fauna. The Laborites view the Greens as the Palinistas view those big shots who go to college to learn and stuff.

A Wall Street Journal editorial today picks up on this theme, which colors the battle between Henry Waxman (of the ascendant Greens) and John Dingell (of the declining Laborites) for Dingell’s long-held seat as top Democratic on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Much of the same cultural and class animus that popularly defined the Red State-Blue State divide is very much evident within the Democratic Party itself and could mean that we have some form of divided government after all.

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The Visa Waiver Program: Our Achilles’ Mouth

Posted by Jim Harper

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) have slammed ($) DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff for certifying the expansion of the Visa Waiver program. Under the expansion, citizens of 34 countries that satisfy certain security and immigration-related requirements do not have to obtain visas to enter the United States for up to 90 days. The seven newly added countries are: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, the Republic of Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia.

In criticizing Chertoff and the Visa Waiver Program, Senator Feinstein is quoted by National Journal saying, “I continue to believe that the visa waiver program is our Achilles’ heel.”

Achilles is the mythical fighter in Greek and Roman poetry who was killed by an arrow striking his heel where there was a void in his armor. It’s a totally inappropriate metaphor for the security of the United States against terrorism.

The United States is a large and vibrant nation, and our security is nothing like the security of a lone fighter. A lone fighter may die if his armor fails, but there is no realistic strike against our body politic that could do us in. (Never mind what terrorists and their fear-monger allies concoct in their heads.)

The United States is too large and strong to be taken down by anything any terrorist could execute, and our country is too capable of self-repair. (This all assumes that ‘leaders’ like Feinstein don’t attack the mechanisms of self-repair - the nation’s vital organs of freedom, prosperity, and decentralized power - in the wake of any attack).

The error in Senator Feinstein’s thinking is significant because it drives the expectation that any harm coming to the country from terrorists is potentially fatal. This falsehood drives a zero-risk attitude about terrorism that is ultimately self-destructive. Excessive security around our trade and travel will hinder it and deny us its benefits. We hurt ourselves - shoot ourselves in the foot, as it were - if the costs imposed by security measures are greater than the risks they avert.

Restricting travel from countries in the Visa Waiver Program is like Achilles putting armor on his mouth. Doing so forecloses the possibility of being struck by an arrow in the mouth, yes, but it also makes it harder to breath and impossible to eat.

Security is hard, and metaphors like “Achilles’ heel” don’t help people understand the problems.

Secretary Chertoff has done the right thing by starting to re-open the country to trade and tourism. He should be commended rather than skewered. Senators Feinstein and Lieberman are wrong.

More Debunking of DHS E-Verify Claims - and the Bureaucrats that Make Them

Posted by Jim Harper

In past months, I spent a good deal of time debunking advocacy for E-Verify from the Department of Homeland Security.

The National Immigration Law Center has been in the fray for quite a while, too - they have a wealth of materials online - and recently added to it with a short, sweet primer on what it takes to comply with E-Verify: more than DHS wants to believe, that’s for sure.

That’s typical of bureaucrats, by the way. They study their programs all day every day - unaware of the challenges and priorities of real businesspeople - and come away finding it impossible to believe that someone could find their product complex.

Well, guess what? When your job is running a plumbing business, a grocery store, a restaurant, or a manufacturing plant, you don’t have all day every day to figure out your compliance issues. They’re burdens that destroy productivity.

E-Verify has been offered up as a panacea for immigration problems, but the cure is worse than the disease. I wrote at length about the regulatory burdens, complexities, and principled reasons to oppose electronic employment verification on principle in a paper called “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

I had a friendly chat with Stewart Baker, the foil in many of my “debunking” posts linked above, the other night. Affable as ever, he reported unawareness of my writings on this blog. If true, this illustrates another problem with bureaucracy: Decision-makers are insulated to the point of ignorance. Privacy advocates “can’t and won’t tell you precisely how [things like] REAL ID [and E-Verify] threaten[] privacy” if you’re not paying attention.

A Breezy Slide From Vote Integrity to National ID

Posted by Jim Harper

Writing at Slate, Richard Hasen makes the case for nationalizing voter registration.

Yglesias approves (as does Drum at Mother Jones) and he ultimately concludes - though “nobody’s supposed to say this” - that “implementing a National ID Card system would help solve a lot of problems at what looks to me to be an extremely low cost in civil liberties.”

Tell that to the dead in Rwanda. It never occurred to the Belgian government that the identity card system they put in place there would be used to administer genocide 60 years later, but it was.

Bruce Schneier calls it “bad civic hygiene” to build a technology infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state. That’s what a national ID system is.

It’s easy to arrive at facile conclusions about national IDs if you don’t think it all the way through. Joseph Eaton published a book in 1986 called Card Carrying Americans that did just that (and didn’t, as to the thinking through). My write-up of it in 2005 called it “full of ‘would’s and ‘could’s - an exercise in imagination with few tethers to real-world practicalities.”

Same with Hasen’s article:

The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York.

Except that it doesn’t work that way. Simply giving people a unique identifier gets you the Social Security number. To prevent people voting in multiple jurisdictions, you don’t give, you take - take a biometric identifier, database it, and use it at every polling place (leaving the door still wide open to absentee ballot fraud).

Voting issues can’t be solved consistent with our national values quite so glibly. If it were easy, it would already have been done. Thoughtful people should resist, not indulge, the temptation to stab at voting concerns with a national ID.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see a national voter registration system converted to lots of purposes that aren’t as congenial as regularizing voter registration. Citing the fate of Rwandans was overly dramatic, of course. It’s only the most recent example among apartheid South Africa, Stalinist Russia, and Nazi-occupied Europe, none of which can happen here . . . .

What we could expect in the near term would be more and more thorough data collection, tighter and tighter government monitoring of commerce, work, housing, health care, education, and communications - for illegal immigration control, at first. But new uses would accrue with each shift in public urgency.

The most concerning of what Hasen has to say is this:

There’s something in this for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats talk about wanting to expand the franchise, and there’s no better way to do it than the way most mature democracies do it: by having the government register voters. For Republicans serious about ballot integrity, this should be a winner as well. No more ACORN registration drives, and no more concerns about Democratic secretaries of state not aggressively matching voters enough to motor vehicle databases.

It’s deeply concerning, the prospect of the major political parties uniting against the people to “mature” our democracy and give us a national ID.

How to Save E-Verify: Grow the Federal Government!

Posted by Jim Harper

The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has written a careful defense of the “E-Verify” program, the federal immigration background check system. Unfortunately, his prescriptions for rescuing the program would grow the government in several directions - cost and intrusiveness, to name two. At root, E-Verify and “internal enforcement” of immigration law are incompatible with life in a free country under a federal government of limited scope and power.

The paper starts with an important admission that I failed to address with sufficient force in my paper on E-Verify: Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.

“Of the millions of illegal immigrants in this country,” Rector says, noting a trio of studies, “the best evidence suggests that some 50 percent to 60 percent of this employment occurs ‘on the books.’”

This means, of course, that 40 to 50 percent of illegal immigrants working in the country are “off the books.” Even a flawless E-Verify system would have no effect on their ability to work in the country. The “magnet” of working and living the United States would not even be weakened for them. Spending a billion dollars over the next four years to continue E-Verify would do about half what people think it would do.

(The $1 billion figure is Rector’s number, combining private sector and government costs. Government estimates put the five-year government cost of E-Verify at $572 million, and lost federal revenue from a similar proposed program at $178 billion over ten years.)

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Fear of Sharia? Oh, Please.

Posted by Jim Harper

Reviewing the new bills in Congress for my side-project WashingtonWatch.com, I come across some interesting stuff — and some dumb stuff.

Very dumb is how I would characterize a new bill introduced this week. H.R. 6975 would require aliens to attest that they will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States as a condition of their admission to our country.

On the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I assessed it thusly:

First, there’s the simple bureaucratic nonsense of administering this thing: We’re going to ask every Christian, Catholic, Zen Buddhist, and Hindu not to advocate traditional Islamic law? What an utterly stupid waste of time. I don’t want a penny of my money going to pay for this.

But more importantly, a law like this communicates precisely the wrong thing to new immigrants and the world at large. It tells the world that we’re a weak, fearful country, and that we believe Sharia law is possible in the United States. It tells the world that we’ve come off our traditional moorings and that we no longer believe in free speech and tolerance of all opinions, no matter how wrong.

Let’s talk substance, just in case one or two of you out there are weak and fearful: There is no possibility — none — that Sharia law will be established in the United States. Not by any government body at any level. This country can stand to have Sharia advocated by whatever tiny minority might want to — without any risk. In fact, allowing such discussion will help dispel whatever small demand there could be for Sharia, because it would be so obviously incompatible with our way of life.

It’s embarassing that a strong, free country like ours would even consider an idea like this.

Five More Years of E-Verify: $572,000,000

Posted by Jim Harper

More than half-a-billion dollars is the cost that the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will take to run “E-Verify,” the federal government’s immigration background-check system, for five more years. That’s about five dollars per U.S. family, according to WashingtonWatch.com’s net present value calculation. (Disclosure: I run that site.)

Think that’s not much? Take five dollars out of your wallet and tear it up. Then imagine every family in the country tearing up five dollars at the dinner table - before eating a meal made more expensive by the dearth of good workers in the United States to grow, harvest, process, ship, and vend their food.

E-Verify is about spending money to worsen our country’s economic situation. And if E-Verify were to go national, it would be used to give the federal government even more regulatory control over law-abiding Americans.

My paper on the topic is “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

New Income and Poverty Figures Spoil the Pity Party

Posted by Daniel Griswold

The Census Bureau’s release this morning of the latest income, poverty and health insurance numbers did not follow the script of those who want to paint a picture of a nation in crisis.

Opponents of free trade, immigration, and limited government constantly tell us that the middle class is shrinking, the poor are getting poorer and more numerous, and the number of Americans without health insurance is climbing inexorably. Their solution is always to restrict trade and immigration and launch expensive new programs to alleviate the obvious misery.

Spoiling the pity party is this morning’s widely anticipated report, “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007.” Among its major findings:

• The number and percentage of Americans without health insurance actually declined slightly in 2007 compared to 2006. The share without insurance in 2007, 15.3 percent, is actually lower than it was a decade ago.
• Median household income is not falling: “Between 2006 and 2007, real median household income rose 1.3 percent, from $49,568 to $50,233—a level not statistically different from the 1999 prerecession income peak.”
• The share of households earning a middle-class income of between $35,000 and $100,000 in real 2007 dollars has indeed shrunk slightly compared to a decade ago, but so too has the share earning less than $35,000 a year, while the share earning more than $100,000 continues to rise. The middle class is not shrinking; it is moving up.
• The 12.5 percent of Americans living below the poverty line in 2007 was statistically unchanged from 2006, and remains below the 13.3 poverty rate in 1997. The poverty rate has been trending downward since the early 1990s during a time of growing trade and immigration flows.
• The Gini coefficient, a statistical measure of income inequality, was .463 in 2007, down slightly from earlier in the decade and virtually the same as it was a decade ago.

We can argue all day about what policies should be adopted to spur growth and higher incomes for the broadest swath of Americans. We certainly have plenty of ideas here at Cato. But it flies in the face of reality to argue that the major indicators of economic well being in America are trending downward in some sort of crisis that demands sweeping government intervention.

Our Convoluted, Less-than-open Immigration System

Posted by Daniel Griswold

If you think the United States has an “open border” policy toward immigrants, check out this immigration flowchart put together by our friends over at the Reason Foundation.

In one graphic sweep, it explains better than mere words why we need comprehensive immigration reform.

Of course, if you are one of those people who like to read the articles and not just look at the pictures, you can check out Cato research on immigration at the Center for Trade Policy Studies web site.

The Answer to High Oil Prices and Global Warming? More Global Poverty, Less Immigration

Posted by Daniel Griswold

Opponents of immigration are now trying to hitch their wagon to worries about high oil prices and global warming.

An ad on page A12 of today’s Washington Post asks, “If foreign oil has us over a barrel now, what happens when our population increases by another 100 million?” The text of the ad tries to provide the answer: “With America’s population at a record 300 million today, [oil] supplies are again tight in spite of record high prices. And the U.S. Census Bureau projects that another 110 million people will be added to our population between 2000 and 2040.” So, if we want lower oil prices, we need to reduce America’s population growth and that means reducing immigration. Get it?

The ad is sponsored by five anti-immigration, anti-population-growth groups, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Californians for Population Stabilization.

The ad provides no evidence that rising global demand for oil has been driven primarily or even significantly by population growth in the United States. In fact, our total oil consumption has actually declined compared to last year, while demand continues to rise in developing countries. The two previous big spikes in global oil prices, in 1973 and 1979, occurred when the U.S. population was 80 to 90 million LOWER than it is today.

The future direction of oil prices will be determined by such factors as energy efficiency, economic growth in emerging economies, oil production, and development of alternative energy sources. Immigration rates to the United States won’t matter.

As though on cue, the Center for Immigration Studies released a report this morning with the headline, “Immigration to U.S. Increases Global Greenhouse-Gas Emissions.” The report argues that immigration “significantly increases world-wide CO2 emissions because it transfers population from lower-polluting parts of the world to the United States, which is a higher-polluting country.”

What the CIS study is really arguing is that rich people pollute more than poor people, so the world would be better off if more people remained poor. The same argument could be used to oppose economic development in places such as China and India that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the past two decades.

Through the dark lens of CIS, the world is a better place when poor people remain stuck in poor countries, and poor countries remain poor.

E-Verify: More Study Needed

Posted by Jim Harper

Though reauthorization of E-Verify was briefly in doubt, it appears now that congressional authorizers have agreed on a way forward, and that the program needs a lot more study.

A bill on the House floor today would extend E-Verify as a “voluntary” program for 5 years and require much more study of the system and its problems. The consensus at the beginning of the year was that Congress would require every employer in the country to use it by the end of the year.

Since then, flaws in the E-Verify database and tracking system have come to light and it has become more clear that “internal enforcement” of immigration law means tracking and databasing all Americans. My paper on the subject is called “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

E-Verify is losing its luster. In the reauthorization bill, Congress has tasked the Government Accountability Office with conducting two studies to explore problems with the system and the policy. One will look into the large number of erroneous “tentative nonconfirmations,” their causes, and potential remedies. DHS sought to glide past these issues in its advocacy for E-Verify this year. The other will look at how E-Verify would effect small businesses (and also small non-profits and municipalities). Current users of E-Verify tend to be large employers that are motivated (by threat of enforcement or past enforcements) to comply scrupulously with the law. The already low quality of the E-Verify system’s results will drop when other employers not so motivated begin to use it.

If E-Verify goes forward another five years, technical and programmatic problems will become more clear. But we shouldn’t take our eye off the ball. A national E-Verify system would be used to give the federal government direct regulatory control over law-abiding Americans. Federal authorities would use it to control not just work, but housing, financial services, health care, and access to alcohol, tobacco, and firearms — and these are just the obvious things.

Reauthorization Of E-Verify In Doubt

Posted by Jim Harper

Had you asked anyone knowledgeable in the area a year ago, they would have told you that Congress was going to make “E-Verify,” the federal government’s immigration background check system, mandatory for all employers by the end of 2008.

Well, a headline in National Journal’s Congress Daily yesterday tells quite a different story (paylink): “Reauthorization Of E-Verify Immigration Program In Doubt.”

“House lawmakers and aides are locked in an impasse over legislation that would renew a program employers can use to verify the legal status of their workers,” the story says, “mainly over language that some worry might ultimately kill this means of enforcing immigration laws.”

E-Verify has gone from “greased” to “on-the-chopping-block” in just one short year.

Irony of ironies, it’s the bureaucracy that may kill it. The main holdup is a dispute over how the system would be paid for. The Department of Homeland Security has apparently been sticking the Social Security Administration with the bill for operating the system, and Social Security hasn’t got any spare funds.

This brings together threads from a couple recent posts of mine on E-Verify. I wrote in April about the inability of the Social Security Administration to provide the services it is currently called on to perform. New responsibilities placed on SSA wouldn’t just magically get done.

From a representative of a Social Security workers’ union, I had learned the following about what people could expect when they went to straighten out their E-Verify paperwork with SSA:

What would the process be like? Well, try calling your local SSA field office to find out. The SSA worker rep reported that 50% of those calls aren’t answered because field offices are too busy. Calls to the SSA’s national 800-number don’t go through 25% of the time. It’s not just a phone problem. The agency currently has a backlog of 752,000 on disability rulings. That’s three quarters of a million people who aren’t getting an answer from SSA. It takes 530 days – a little under a year and a half – to get a disability ruling out of SSA.

And I speculated the other day that Stewart Baker’s recent rant against the Society for Human Resource Management might be motivated by bureaucratic jealousy. Now we see that there’s plenty of it to go around. E-Verify isn’t important enough to get federal agencies to play well together.

In truth, I don’t think E-Verify will go under because of this dust-up, but I don’t think it’s going to be the mandatory, nationwide program so many thought either. (I described many ills of such a policy in my paper, “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”)

There are lessons here for Republicans (and some conservatives) who dreamed that they would solve illegal immigration with a big, national, background-checking enforcement system: Bureaucrats own the bureaucracy. You do what they let you do; they do not do what you think they should do. You can’t turn big government to your ends. It only works for its own ends.

Stewart Baker Crosses a Line - What’s the Strategy?

Posted by Jim Harper

I’ve been nothing if not dogged about responding to DHS’ advocacy for REAL ID and E-Verify. I’ve had fun responding to post after DHS post on the “Leadership Journal” blog promoting E-Verify. But I let one recent post from DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker go by. Enough people have pointed me to it and asked me what I thought that I’m finally drawn to comment.

Baker’s post, “Exactly What Do They Want?,” addressed none of the substance of the E-Verify program, but simply attacked a group called the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

 Here’s a taste:

SHRM lobbies for the HR execs who do corporate hiring. It also opposes E-Verify. I suppose corporate hiring is easier if you can hire illegal workers, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that SHRM wants to kill a program that makes it harder to hire illegal workers.

But SHRM has taken Washington arts to a new level. SHRM says it doesn’t want to kill E-Verify. SHRM says it wants to replace E-Verify with a new, better program to prevent illegal hiring. A closer look shows that the SHRM alternative is doomed to fail – and will take years to do so. So for a decade, while the SHRM alternative is failing, no one will have a good tool to actually prevent illegal hires. Which may be precisely what SHRM wants.

Politics can be ugly. And attacking the motives of your opponents is ugly politics. But what matters in the first instance is that it’s politics at all. Stewart Baker is an executive branch official who was appointed to his office, not elected. His role is to administer the laws, not to participate in the political processes that decide what the laws are. He crossed a crucial line by becoming a critic - and a harsh critic at that - of a private association because of its public policy stance.

It’s interesting to speculate about what caused Baker’s fit of pique. A theme in his post is the potential transfer of responsibilities for verification of workers from the Department of Homeland Security to other agencies like SSA and HHS. Job #1 for government ministers is to build their fiefdoms, and the SHRM’s preferred employment verification vehicle, the New Employee Verification Act, would be a DHS bureaucrat’s biggest outrage.

But everyone who knows him knows that Stewart Baker is savvy and cool. It’s not like him to lose his temper - especially not in such a public way. So I expect that this is part of some clever strategy, but I just don’t know what it is. Baker’s vitriol has drawn justified indignation from the folks at SHRM. The comments on Baker’s post have lots of interesting tidbits, including allegations that Baker consistently declined to meet with SHRM. He got written up in Politico for starting this public imbroglio. And the human resources blogosphere is popping with discussion of Baker’s explosion.

So, does Stewart Baker surprise us all and pull a rabbit out of a hat? Or has he really lost his cool? It could be frustrating, as he winds down his stint at DHS, to look down the road behind him at his key issues: the E-Verify program limping along, and the REAL ID Act in full collapse.

AZ Petition Seeks to Reverse E-Verify Mandate

Posted by Jim Harper

A petition has been filed in Arizona to qualify a ballot initiative that would reverse the E-Verify mandate that went into effect there in January.

My recent paper on E-Verify is here, and I’ve posted about E-Verify in Arizona a few times.

E-Verify: What’s Going on with the 5.3%?

Posted by Jim Harper

In a recent post on E-Verify, the system for conducting federal immigration background checks on American workers hired to new jobs, I criticized an assumption on the part of DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker that the 5.3% of people who receive “final nonconfirmations” from the system are illegal immigrants:

Baker’s conclusion that the 5.3% of workers finally nonconfirmed are illegal workers is without support. The statistic just as easily could show that the 5.3% of law-abiding American-citizen workers are given tentative nonconfirmations, and they find it impossible to get them resolved. More likely, some were dismissed by employers, never informed that there was a problem with E-Verify; some didn’t have the paperwork, the time, or the skills to navigate the bureaucracy; and some were illegal workers who went in search of work elsewhere, including under the table.

Yesterday at a meeting of the DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, a new data point opened a small window onto the situation of the 5.3%. To review, 94.2% of the workers submitted to the system are confirmed as eligible for work within 24 hours. Of the 5.8% tentatively nonconfirmed, .5% successfully contest their nonconfirmations, leaving us with 5.3% who receive final nonconfirmations for reasons yet unknown.

Staff of the DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services bureau reported yesterday that they had recently added a “doublecheck” on tentative nonconfirmations, asking employers to review the data they had entered for errors. During the two months this has been in place, it has lowered the tentative nonconfirmation rate by 30%. That’s right - 30% of the tentative nonconfirmations had been caused by employers’ fat fingers. (”Fat fingers” is not a knock on employers’ fitness - it’s a techie term for data entry errors.)

If we assume that the figures recited above are from a period before the new fat-finger doublecheck, the 5.8% tentative nonconfirmation rate should have dropped 1.74% since the double-check was implemented. Next, assume (generously) that all of the .5% successfully contesting their tentative nonconfirmations were part of this cohort - the victims of employers’ fat fingers. This leaves 1.24% of workers submitted to E-Verify during this period who were eligible to work but victims of employers’ data entry errors - and who failed to contest their nonconfirmations.

There is plenty of room for error in this extrapolation, and I’ll happily publish refinements or corrections to what I’ve written here, but it looks like more than 1 in 100 employees are tentatively nonconfirmed by E-Verify and go on to final nonconfirmation even though they are eligible to work under the immigration laws. That’s a huge percentage considering that millions of Americans’ employability is on the line. The burden is on DHS and other proponents of electronic employment eligibility verification to figure out what’s going on and to fix it.

E-Verify is not ready for prime time, and we wouldn’t want it even if it was.

Spending Money to Restrain Economic Growth

Posted by Jim Harper

Sayeth the GAO:

Although DHS has not prepared official cost figures, USCIS officials estimated that a mandatory E-Verify program could cost a total of about $765 million for fiscal years 2009 through 2012 if only newly hired employees are queried through the program and about $838 million over the same 4-year period if both newly hired and current employees are queried. USCIS has estimated that it would need additional staff for a mandatory E-Verify program, but was not yet able to provide estimates for its staffing needs. SSA has estimated that implementation of a mandatory E-Verify program would cost a total of about $281 million and require hiring 700 new employees for a total of 2,325 additional workyears for fiscal years 2009 through 2013.

An E-Verify Triple: That’s a De-De-Debunker

Posted by Jim Harper

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker has weighed in with another post on the DHS “Leadership Journal” blog about the E-Verify system for conducting federal immigration background checks on all people hired in the United States. He takes on three supposed myths about E-Verify.

Myth 1: That E-Verify is burdensome for employers.

Baker says that E-Verify is a bit less burdensome than ordering books for the first time on Amazon.com. It would be fun to actually run that test. But just for starters, here’s the 600-word form you have to read and fill out before you even register as an employer. The word count of the Memorandum of Understanding you have to read and sign is well over 3,000 words - eight pages of legalistic instructions. Jeff Bezos! Call your bankruptcy lawyer!

Buying a book from Amazon.com doesn’t require you to check someone else’s documents, doesn’t put you at risk of violating federal law, and so on, and so on. These just aren’t comparables.

Baker’s most interesting evidence? An anonymous commenter on one of his earlier posts who just gushes about E-Verify. In fact, the first two comments on that post - both anonymous - come within nine minutes of each other. One praises E-Verify’s ease of use. The other comes from the “worker” perspective - just like a PR flack would want to have covered. Here’s the actual quote: “This E-verify system will let you know if you have a mistake that you need to correct before it is just too late for you!” So very like an infomercial . . .

But let’s cut to the chase: Regulators in agencies across the federal government are constantly coming with burdens on employers. Oh, they claim that each one is wafer thin, yes. But the cumulative results are disgusting.

Myth, the second: That E-Verify is discriminatory.

Critics “conjure up evil employers who disfavor certain ethnic groups when they apply government hiring rules,” says Baker. That’s not quite it. Unfortunately, rational employers would disfavor certain ethnic groups. Here’s how I put it in my paper “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration“:

With illegal immigrants today coming predominantly from Spanish-speaking countries south of the U.S. border, identity fraud and corruption attacks on the EEV system would focus largely on Hispanic surnames and given names. Recognizing that Hispanic employees—even native-born citizens—are more often caught up in identity fraud and tentative nonconfirmation hassles, employers would select against Hispanics in their hiring decisions.

But this is against the rules, protests Baker. And it’s true that the program’s rules forbid this behavior. But Baker is thinking quite a bit like the economist in this old joke:

An economist, a physicist, and an engineer are trapped on a desert island and all they have to eat is a can of baked beans. The engineer first tries to open the can by putting at an angle to the sun to try and burn a hole in it. That doesn’t work. So the physicist gets a rock and does some calculations as to how much force he would have to hit the can with to get it open. No luck. Finally, the economist turns to them both and says, “You’re doing it all wrong! What we need to do is assume we have a can opener . . .”

“If there are rules against it, it won’t happen.” Friends, avoid South Seas adventures with economist Stewart Baker.

Myth 3: That E-Verify does nothing about identity theft.

E-Verify does something about identity theft. You have to have a matching name and Social Security Number pair to get through the system. That makes defrauding employers harder. It will also make identity theft more profitable and more common if E-Verify goes national. Again, from my paper:

Faced with the alternative of living in poverty and failing to remit wealth to their families, illegal immigrants would deepen the modest identity frauds they are involved in today. Their actions would draw American citizens, unfortunately, into a federal bureaucratic identity vortex.

But Baker is talking about in-system fraud, and the idea of accumulating more biometric information into a national identity system. Currently, a “photo screening tool” in E-Verify shows employers the picture that was printed on DHS-issued permanent resident cards and employment authorization documents. This suppresses forgery of cards, while it may lull employers into checking the card against the computer screen - not against the worker. Whatever the case, DHS is seeking access to passport photos from the State Department and driver license photos from state governments across the country so that it can knit together a national biometric database. (Pictures are biometrics - relatively crude ones, of course. When having a picture database fails to secure against illegal immigration, they’ll move to stronger ones.)

Baker is exaggerating to say that the photo screening tool is a significant step in countering identity fraud. It’s only in very limited use, the system itself would promote identity fraud, and countering identity fraud this way requires a national biometric database, with all the privacy ills that entails. This is why we wouldn’t want E-Verify even if it was ready for prime-time.

Three myths debunked? Or three debunkings de-debunked? Secretary Baker’s commentaries are welcome because they illustrate key points of disagreement, allowing you, the American public, a fuller view into the issues at stake.

The E-Verify Debate as it Stands in Kansas

Posted by Jim Harper

Here’s a good article in the Wichita Eagle on the debate over E-Verify, with particular reference to the state of Kansas, where the legislature recently considered requiring employers to use this system for a federal background check on all new hires.

My paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration,” is here.

De-Debunker: Low-Hanging Fruit

Posted by Jim Harper

Another day, another debunking.

DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker has another effort to debunk information about the E-Verify program on DHS’ Leadership Journal blog. In this case, it’s “Debunking the ‘E-Verify Capacity Problem.’”

Critics say that only 60 thousand employers are registered with E-Verify, while there are 6 million employers in the U.S. But this is an example of using an accurate statistic to produce a misleading result. Many of those 6 million employers won’t hire a single worker this year. Others will hire thousands. What counts is how many individual hires the system can handle. . . . Based on a recent load testing, the system has the capacity to handle 240 million queries a year. That’s three to four times the number of people who are usually hired in a given year.

Fair enough, and frankly I hadn’t been aware of there being an argument about a “capacity” problem with E-Verify’s servers or data systems.

Running a Web search on “E-Verify capacity” to see what the capacity argument is, I found little other than a Government Accountability Office report which says the following:

A mandatory E-Verify program would necessitate an increased capacity at both U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and SSA to accommodate the estimated 7.4 million employers in the United States. . . . Although DHS has not prepared official cost figures, USCIS officials estimated that a mandatory E-Verify program could cost a total of about $765 million for fiscal years 2009 through 2012 if only newly hired employees are queried through the program and about $838 million over the same 4-year period if both newly hired and current employees are queried. . . . . SSA has estimated that implementation of a mandatory E-Verify program would cost a total of about $281 million and require hiring 700 new employees for a total of 2,325 additional workyears for fiscal years 2009 through 2013.

That’s a very different kind of capacity - and very expensive. I have written here before about a Social Security Administration workers’ union official who pointed out the lacking capacity at SSA to handle national E-Verify.

The difference in these kinds of capacity reveals an inference in my and others’ criticism of E-Verify that Baker and the folks at DHS may be missing. I may have been too obscure again yesterday when I wrote, “Just because you have a glass coffee table, that doesn’t mean you can build a glass sundeck.”

The class of businesses currently using E-Verify is particularly proactive about not hiring illegal immigrants — either because they are naturally fastidious or because they have been subject to enforcement actions that practically or legally require it. They may self-select against hiring potential illegal immigrants — perhaps avoiding native or fluent Spanish speakers, for example. If their motivation is avoiding trouble with the feds, these employers may not tell workers about tentative nonconfirmations, getting rid of them under other pretenses. Or they may prescreen workers using E-Verify before even hiring them. (Sure, E-Verify fan, tell yourself it’s against the rules - like driving over the speed limit is against the rules.) This all makes it look to folks like Stewart Baker like they’re catching illegal workers.

For what they’re worth, these employers are the low-hanging fruit for the E-Verify program. This is the best E-Verify will get. The rest of the nation’s employers, and the workers they hire, will produce higher error rates and new, more difficult problems.

The capacity of E-Verify’s databases and servers may be fine. The capacity of the various federal agencies to sort out the results of national E-Verify — not so good.

E-Verify Debunking Exposes Debunking Errors

Posted by Jim Harper

Congratulations are due once again to the Department of Homeland Security for engaging in open dialogue about its programs, even controversial ones like “E-Verify” — a system that Congress may require all U.S. employers to use for running federal background checks on every single new employee.

Openness is healthy, and the comments to a recent post on E-Verify by my old friend DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker are poking some holes in his somewhat facile analysis. I’ll weigh in with a little more, based mostly on my recent paper “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

Baker says that critics claim the error rate in E-Verify is as high as 4% and will lead to millions of Americans losing their jobs by mistake. To refute this, he points to a study commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security showing that 94.2% of new hires in a sample of 1,000 E-Verify queries were automatically verified, 0.5% resolved a mismatch, and 5.3% received a final nonconfirmation (that is, they either didn’t try or couldn’t challenge the finding that they were ineligible for employment under U.S. immigration law).

Unfortunately, Baker doesn’t point to the actual study. He just links to a picture of a conclusion from it, so we can’t do much to analyze these figures. If these are the results from reviewing only 1,000 new hires by current E-Verify users, that is far too small a sample and too skewed a group to reflect what would happen were the program taken national.

And he concludes: “Of the thousand, 942 are instantly verified. Instant verification of legal workers surely can’t be an error.” Of course it can! Any number of the 942 might have been illegal immigrants who submitted the name and Social Security Number of a legal worker to the employer.

But putting Baker’s glib, erroneous conclusion aside, I believe the 4% figure cited by critics is not about today’s small E-Verify program. It’s the error rate in the Social Security Administration’s Numident database found by the SSA’s own Inspector General (and it’s 4.1%!). Simple math suggests that this would produce a tentative nonconfirmation in 1 out of 25 new hires in the country were E-Verify to go national.

In fairness, that simple math may actually be simplistic — perhaps some cohorts have higher error rates and others lower. We know, for example, that naturalized citizens suffer error rates in the area of 10%. Perhaps older citizens that are leaving the workforce have higher error rates, leaving a lower error rate among current workers. And over time, the error rate would drop as workers were sent from their jobs to Social Security Administration offices trying to get their paperwork in order. (Put aside for now that the SSA takes more than 500 days to issue disability rulings.)

Baker’s conclusion that the 5.3% of workers finally nonconfirmed are illegal workers is without support. The statistic just as easily could show that the 5.3% of law-abiding American-citizen workers are given tentative nonconfirmations, and they find it impossible to get them resolved. More likely, some were dismissed by employers, never informed that there was a problem with E-Verify; some didn’t have the paperwork, the time, or the skills to navigate the bureaucracy; and some were illegal workers who went in search of work elsewhere, including under the table.

American workers pushed out of the workforce by E-Verify — Baker treats it as “common sense” that they’re illegal aliens, and he doesn’t look any further. The E-Verify program does the same - it has no system for contesting or appealing final nonconfirmations.

With his post, Secretary Baker has only raised the question of error rates in E-Verify. There are many sources of error in a system like this, and making it bigger would reveal more. Just because you have a glass coffee table, that doesn’t mean you can build a glass sundeck.

And we shouldn’t take our eye off the ball. “Mission creep” is a governmental law of gravity. Once in place, a national E-Verify system would be used to give the federal government direct regulatory control over law-abiding Americans. Federal authorities would use it to control not just work, but housing, financial services, and access to alcohol, tobacco, and firearms — for starters. Secretary Baker himself recently suggested using a national ID to control our access to cold medicine. The list of things his successors might do is endless.