High Tech High Jinx

Bill to Expand U.S. Database to Verify Hires

Nathan Weber for The New York Times

David Borris, center, says businesses could be hurt by an employment eligibility check system.

By JULIA PRESTON and ASHLEY PARKER

WASHINGTON — The sweeping immigration measure advancing rapidly in the Senate goes far beyond much-debated border security measures and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants with a crucial requirement that could affect every American who takes a new job in the future.

The provision, a linchpin of the legislation, would require all employers in the country within five years to use a federal electronic system to verify the legal eligibility to work of every new hire, including American citizens. 

Okay,  the I-9 form that was created by the 1986 Immigration Reform Act was designed to make it mandatory for all employers to verify via documentation that all new hires were legally able to work in the United States. New workers had to present a birth certificate, social security card, passport or some other form of legal ID to prove that they were valid to work in the States. Naturally, as is often the case with overblown congressional legislation, there was no enforcement mechanism to ensure that employers were complying with the I-9 requirements. The rest, shall we say, is history.

Now the Feds want to go high tech and use an electronic database to capture this information.  Without some means of forcing employers to enter this required information, we'll be back to square one again. One way to do it perhaps, is to cross reference employers payroll tax returns against the data entered in this database. The employee listings should match. The employers should be forced to sign a statement that says that they are not paying anyone who isn't in the database. If they are paying illegals aliens off the books in cash, then they should be subjected to serious fines.

The IRS can enforce this when they are not busy taking the fifth amendment about all of the other things that they should not be doing.