Emerging Issues Debate

The Changing Face of North Carolina - E-Verify

By Gregory Weeks, GSK Faculty Fellow, UNC-Charlotte

In March, 32 North Carolina state lawmakers introduced legislation that would force businesses that receive federal stimulus money to use the E-Verify program.  The intent is to prevent undocumented immigrants, primarily Latinos, from getting jobs.  This is a politically popular program, but has serious flaws that must be addressed before it is widely used.

E-Verify is an online database run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.  When someone applies for a job, they must fill out an I-9 form, which includes their social security number.  E-Verify then lets an employer know immediately whether the number is valid.  Since 2007, North Carolina state agencies have been required to use the system, but private sector participation remains voluntary.

The problem is that E-Verify has two serious flaws.  The first is practical, and the second is demographic.  Both must be resolved before the system can succeed.

From a purely practical perspective, the system does not function properly.  It makes mistakes.

According to Rep. Wil Neumann, “This is Americans' money, and we ought to make sure Americans are getting these jobs.”  Unfortunately, E-Verify will not achieve that goal.  Precisely for that reason, the U.S. Congress had stripped language to include E-Verify from the stimulus package.

In 2008 it received 6.6 million queries, and the federal government reports that 3.5 percent were never confirmed.  Therefore, approximately 231,000 people were presumably fired, but in fact we have no way of knowing how many were truly in the country illegally.  Government studies have already shown that foreign-born United States citizens are more likely to receive a mismatch (called a Tentative Non-Confirmation).  In fact, about 10 percent of them are flagged.

If it were federal law, E-Verify would have to handle 63 million requests a year, so the number of mismatches (and mistakes) would increased tenfold from today.

The burden of dealing with mismatches is a serious one.  The database may well be improved in the future, but currently it forces businesses to expend scarce resources to address mismatches and possibly to delay work until employees are verified. 

Although employees cannot be fired while contesting a result, they will have to spend time gathering documents and reporting to the nearest Social Security Administration office or the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition, state authorities must check up on businesses to determine whether all the mismatches are being dealt with properly, or indeed if the business is using the system at all.  The state of Georgia passed a law in 2006 ordering all local governments and businesses to verify the status of their hires through E-Verify, but even the law’s supporters now acknowledge that the state cannot afford to enforce it.

From a demographic perspective, E-Verify will be an economic detriment unless it is accompanied by immigration reform that provides sufficient slots for immigrant workers.

About 6.7 percent of the state’s population is of Hispanic origin.  In Mecklenburg County, the state’s largest, the total is 9.6 percent.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a typical Latino in North Carolina is about eleven years younger than a non-Latino.  Even in a recession, North Carolina needs those workers.

Without that young workforce, the state simply cannot support its older citizens, fund its health plan, or offer the standard of living every resident wants and deserves. 

As former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff put it in a recent interview, “if we cut off our nose to spite our face, what we are going to do is hamper our ability to grow our economy.”  The answer is immigration reform that provides legal channels for needed workers and brings illegal workers out of the shadows.

The Hispanic population is in North Carolina to stay.  About one out of every three Latinos here is a United States citizen and that number is going up all the time.  They are not just seasonal laborers who come and go.

Parents find jobs, their children attend schools, and they become attached to the region.  In 2007, the first baby born in Charlotte was Latino.  In 2008, the same happened in the Triangle.  Statewide, 10 percent of births were to Hispanic mothers in 2000, which increased to 17 percent in 2006.  Almost 1 out of every 5 babies born in Charlotte has a Hispanic mother.

These workers are both our present and our future.

If E-Verify’s accuracy was increased, and there was a legal channel for necessary workers, it would be a valuable tool.  For now, however, it is a costly mistake.