WASHINGTON — The Senate-approved immigration bill contains controversial provisions that would require all job seekers to present matching digital-photograph documentation of their legal status before landing employment.
But in supervising a labor force composed largely of American-born or naturalized citizens, the program known as E-Verify breaches a constitutional right to privacy, according to some experts.
More stringent qualifications for employment represent the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to police the work of unauthorized immigrants, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“It’s a violation of rights and wrongly focused,” said Richard Sobel, a visiting scholar at the Buffett Center at Northwestern University. “The proportion of the labor force to unauthorized immigrants is pretty small. It’s really a manageable problem but the proposal creates an unmanageable and intrusive national identification system.”
Of the 155.8 million people in the U.S. labor force, just 7.1 percent are undocumented immigrants. And only 45 percent of new undocumented immigrants came to the U.S. illegally, according to a 2006 estimate from the Pew Research Center. The rest immigrated legally but hold expired visas.
E-Verify is a Web-based identification system that aggregates and compares employees’ data, including their Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, and personal records from the Homeland Security Department and Social Security Administration.
“Many Americans without driver’s licenses will lose work time traveling to vital records offices for birth or marriage certificates or to motor vehicle agencies for state IDs to become eligible to be E-Verified,” Sobel wrote in a June column for CNN.com.
To acquire this new digital ID card, immigrant employees must submit to fingerprint tests and a digital photo to be used in conjunction with face-recognition software. Homeland Security stores digital photos of citizens and others on a national database. The photos then need to be matched to pictures on an identity document, under the bill.
“It’s not a silver bullet,” said an analyst at a respected conservative think-tank, who preferred to remain anonymous. “There are still ways for people to get around the system with identity fraud.”
The mandate is a clear violation of citizens’ rights to take employment, among other constitutional guarantees, according to Sobel.
“The problems are federalism and privacy,” Sobel said. “Privacy is the right to be let alone. This provision essentially gathers data and digital pictures of people managed by security services.”
Twenty states, but only about 7 percent of employers, have voluntarily adopted E-Verify, which has existed in varying forms since 1996, Sobel said. But the bill would force all states to comply and integrate digital photos of citizens.
“Sen. Graham has been a strong supporter of E-Verify,” wrote an aide of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in an email. “Our state has already passed legislation on the state level mandating businesses use E-Verify.”
Sobel estimated that implementing E-Verify could cost employers and employees more than $6 billion.
“But the cost to our rights would be even greater,” Sobel said.