Senators to seek limited verification of immigrant status

A section in the Senate's bipartisan immigration overhaul bill that would require employers to check the immigration status of their workers could be finalized as early as Tuesday and is rapidly gaining support from industry groups and immigrant advocates alike.

Title 3 of a revised bill that Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., plans to bring to the Senate floor would establish an electronic employment verification eligibility system under which employers would be required to verify that workers they hire are legally able to be employed.

The system would also give the Homeland Security Department access to information in Social Security Administration databases, something that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recently said is critical for investigations. Crafting Title 3 are Senate Finance Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Senate Finance ranking member Max Baucus, D-Mont., along with Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Barack Obama, D-Ill.

Industry groups and immigrant advocates are throwing their support behind the emerging Senate proposal, as opposed to requirements in the House border security bill passed last December. "We don't like the House bill at all," said Laura Foote Reiff, a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig and co-leader of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a group of businesses and trade associations.

Major differences between the House and Senate proposals include compliance deadlines, employer penalties, privacy protections, redress processes for correcting errors, and employer liability protections, Reiff said.

For example, the House bill would require employers to verify the immigration status of all their workers. The Senate version would only require employers to do checks on newly hired workers, sparing from scrutiny any illegal aliens already in the workforce.

The House bill also would place a cap on how much employers could be fined for knowingly employing illegal immigrants. That limit would be $40,000 per illegal alien for repeat offenders. The Senate version would cap fines at $20,000 for repeat offenders.

Aides to House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a key architect of the House bill, said the Senate is being too lenient on employers and would provide amnesty to illegal immigrants if they are already employed. "The Senate isn't requiring current employees to be checked and that's a big loophole," one aide said.

Developing an employee verification system that can work on a mass scale is an enormous task, said Marshall Fitz, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The House would require Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to expand the Basic Pilot program, which is a system that employers use on a voluntary basis to check the immigration status of their workers. Only about 6,200 employers now use the program.

But the Government Accountability Office identified several weaknesses in the program in an August 2005 report, concluding that it "may not be able to complete timely verifications if the number of employers using the program significantly increased." Fitz said, "The real concern is that unless or until they're able to get their databases accurately updated and corrected ... it seems unlikely that we could have a seamless transition into a broad expansion of this program."