Speech #1100060220

Chairman. my amendment strikes $5 million and puts it back in. It is directed to encourage the promotion of the Basic Pilot Program. We have had a number of hearings on this in the subject matter that has come before the Immigration Subcommittee of which I am the ranking member. And the statistics on that look very encouraging to the effectiveness of the Basic Pilot Program. the Employment Verification Program. if you will. or I will call it the "Instant Check Program." What that program does is it allows an employer to take the information off the I9 document from an employee applicant and introduces that into an Internet page. where that Internet goes off and checks the database of the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security and comes back and verifies if you have the documents before you and the information from the documents that ensure that that is a legal applicant. at least the documents from a legal applicant. What we have seen is that 98.6 percent of the legal applicants are approved in the first try. And when they have to go back and clean up their records a little bit. you get to well over 99 percent accuracy within the Basic Pilot Program. and yet we dont have enough employers that are using it. This has been the substance of many of the proposals for Comprehensive Immigration Reform on how we are going to hold employers accountable and how they are going to verify that the applicants before them are applying with real documents and if those documents identify real people that are lawful to work in the United States. And so as much success as we have had with this. I want to ensure that we have the Department of Homeland Security promoting the Basic Pilot Program.