Deputy Director Aytes on "E-Verify"

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Deputy Director Aytes testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugee and Border Security for a hearing entitled: "Interior Enforcement of Immigration Laws: Eliminating Employer Demand for Illegal Immigrants as Part of Comprehensive Immigration Reform."

It goes without saying that Aytes tesimony was in defense of the E-Verify program arguing that the program addresses illegal immigration from the demand side, i.e., going after tax paying employers, rather than actually acknowledging the reality that United States immigration laws prevent employers from hiring willing employees legally.

Aytes explained that employers can access E-Verify through a "user-friendly" government website that compares information garnered from the employee on the Employment Eligibility Verification Form (Form I-9) with more than 455 million records in the Social Security Administration's (SSA) database, and more than 80 million records in DHS immigration databases.

The first thing I would like to know is what is Deputy Director's Aytes definition of "user friendly", because in my experience whenever you are required to interact with a government agency, the experience is almost never "user-friendly", and requires a law degree and extensive experience in the immigration law to be able to successfully navigate.

In any event, what Deputy Director Aytes failed to mention was that the E-verify program fails to combat identity fraud, and promotes rampant abuses because there is virtually no mechanism built into the program safegaurd against an employee from providing an employer with stolen identity information which will come back valid.

Plain and simply, the E-verify system does nothing to fix the real problem, which is that our employers are unable to hire willing employees because our immigration laws prevent them from doing so. Any verification system that is implimented must be in conjunction with comprehensive immigration reform and must apply to new hires only and not existing employees, as well as including protections for existing workers, and provisions for adequate due process.

Congress and the Department need to actually fix our immigration problem, rather than coming up with ways to simply punish and make it more difficult for American employers who pay taxes and create jobs.