E-Verify Executive Order Signed. Now what?
Nothing. As per yet, the Executive order singed on June 12, still has to go through a process of comments and suggestions from all concerned parties. For the moment, e-verify stays as per its last changes from December the last year, in spite the signed Executive order.
The newest addition to the proposed rule, as per the Executive Order, is that federal contractors would be obliged to file with e-verify in order to sign new contract. What were the reasons behind obliging federal contractors to use compulsory E-Verify, since they cannot employ illegal or not verified workforce anyway? As the President states in the Executive Order: “This order is designed to promote economy and efficiency in Federal Government procurement. Stability and dependability are important elements of economy and efficiency. A contractor whose workforce is less stable will be less likely to produce goods and services economically and efficiently than a contractor whose workforce is more stable.” And, as if it was an afterthought, the President remembered that: “It is the policy of the executive branch to enforce fully the immigration laws of the United States, including the detection and removal of illegal aliens and the imposition of legal sanctions against employers that hire illegal aliens.”
Summarizing, the road to solving economical (a stable and efficient workforce) and political (fully enforcing immigration laws, months before Presidential Elections) problems is paved with good intentions. Great. But if you read between the lines, you will see that, first, the Executive Order is not final yet. As the website of the Department of Homeland Security says “The Executive Order instructs Federal agencies to require contractor participation in E-Verify as a term of future contracts, and the proposed rule provides detailed guidance on how that requirement is to be implemented. However, the proposed rule is not a final rule; it is a proposal that is open for public comment at this time. There may be substantive changes to the rule before it becomes final. Moreover, the final rule will not be effective until 30 days after publication.”
So far, the public comments already that the executive order will permit breaches in the privacy in the employees and will not solve the problems with the illegal workers. The intention for “minimizing verification-related discrimination” is not exactly well understood by several civil rights advocacy groups, who believe that giving all information, including “voluntarily” providing driving license records to the DHS is a bad idea.
Second, the USCIS states that “The top industries using E-Verify include food services and drinking places, administrative and support services, professional and technical services, other information services, and clothing and accessories stores.” Not exactly industries that hire illegal workers, except maybe the food and drinking places.
Third, there is the technical and logistics problem. If signed as Rule, the Executive Order will mandate that more than 200,000 federal contractors use E-Verify. To accommodate the increase of compulsory usage of the system, DHS would have to increase the number of employers using the system by more than 1,076 percent and increase the capacity of its servers, so the 2007 backlog doesn’t repeat again.
Is this Executive order paving the way to mandatory nationwide system? Maybe, but this wouldn’t be resolved in the following months. Optimum HR Systems suggests that you stay tuned for new changes and addition to the e-verify system.
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