- Program to Screen Illegal Workers Up 442% from 2007;
1 in 8 New Hires Checked Last Year
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- WASHINGTON - The E-Verify
program will shut down thus week, unless it is reauthorized by Congress.
The free, online system run by the Department of Homeland Security enables
employers to check that new hires are indeed eligible to work in the United
States, rather than relying only on easily forged paper documents.
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- To help inform the debate over this program, the Center
for Immigration Studies has released new data from U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services (online at http://cis.org/node/1087 ) that shows online
employer queries of the system are already approaching 3 million so far
this year, nearly half the 6.6 million queries for all of 2008, which was
itself more than double the use of the system in 2007. If the usage for
2009 continues at the same rate, the number of employer queries for this
year will be 442% greater than in 2007.
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- In 2008, about one in eight new hires nationwide was
checked through E-Verify, and if the projected growth rate continues, perhaps
one-quarter or one-third of all new hires will be verified by the system,
putting it well on the way to becoming a standard hiring practice for all
legitimate employers.
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- In addition, new passport data now available from the
State Department is streamlining work authorization for foreign-born U.S.
citizens. Increased employer satisfaction with E-Verify demonstrated
by the steady increases in employer sign-ups and queries with E-Verify
indicates that E-Verify is one of the most successful programs in
government.
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- Janice Kephart, Director of National Security Policy
at the Center for Immigration Studies, has released this data as a follow-up
to her September 2008 Backgrounder, ''If It's Fixed, Don't Break It: Moving
Forward with E-Verify,'' online at http://cis.org/Everify .
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- # # #
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- The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent
research institution
- which examines and critiques the impact of immigration
on the United States.
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