Congressman Lamar Smith, Twenty First Congressional
District of Texas
Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX): In 1986, Congress made it unlawful for employers to knowingly employ illegal immigrants. Congress also required employers to check the identity and work eligibility documents of all new employees. Unfortunately, the easy availability of counterfeit documents soon made a mockery of this process. Employers who didn’t want to hire illegal immigrants had no choice but to accept documents they knew were likely to be false.
Congress took action in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. The Act created the Basic Pilot Program. For the last decade, this program has provided American employers who want to do the right thing with an effective tool to ensure that they are hiring a legal workforce. It ensures that new employees are not providing their employers with fake Social Security numbers.
As the Basic Pilot Program has grown more popular – over 69,000 employers nationwide now participate – it has been the subject of some very unfair criticism. I want to set the record straight. Participating employers are very happy with the Basic Pilot Program. Last year, an outside evaluation found that “[m]ost employers found the Web Basic Pilot to be an effective and reliable tool for employment verification” and 96 percent did not believe that it overburdened their staffs.
The accuracy of the databases that lie at the heart of the Basic Pilot Program has been unfairly maligned. However, the facts about these databases could not be better. Last year’s outside evaluation found that in less than one percent--only .6 percent--of cases do employees who are eventually determined to be work-authorized receive a tentative nonconfirmation and undergo secondary verification.
This means that persons eligible to work receive immediate confirmation 99.4 percent of the time. For the native-born, 99.9 percent receive immediate confirmation; for employees born outside of the U.S., 97 percent receive immediate confirmation.
A common misperception is that secondary verification means error by a federal agency. This is not the case. Secondary verification most often means that an illegal immigrant has been caught providing bogus information or that an employee has failed to update their records with the Social Security Administration. This is seldom acknowledged.
Even when persons eligible to work have to go through secondary verification, they are “largely satisfied with the services provided by . . . SSA.” Of the employees who contacted local SSA offices as part of the verification process, 95 percent said their work authorization problem was resolved in a timely, courteous and efficient manner.
Finally, it has been specifically alleged that the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General has found the agency’s database to be inaccurate. However, the Inspector General actually stated that “we applaud the Agency on the accuracy of the data we tested.”
The Basic Pilot Program has worked well. In the vast majority of cases, employers find out immediately their new employees are work authorized. Over 99 percent of the time, legal workers receive instantaneous confirmation.
We will hear testimony today from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that they are putting improvements into place that will make the Basic Pilot Program even more responsive.
Finally, I want to applaud the Administration’s decision to require companies who contract with the federal government to use the Basic Pilot Program. This protects the American worker by ensuring that all federal jobs, both direct and indirect, are reserved for legal workers.
