Speech #1100192716

Thank you. Mr. SMITH. for your long work on immigration issues. I often come across legislation that was put in place during the nineties in particular and find out what kind of wisdom was there. I want to also thank the Chair of the Immigration Subcommittee and the support on both sides of the aisle for bringing this 5year reauthorization of EVerify to the floor. But I especially want to thank KEN CALVERT. It is a rare legislator that has the vision to put something in place that has the legacy that has already been created by EVerify. His face and his name will be forever identified with this policy. which I think is the smartest. most technologically adaptive. and the most useful tool that we have for employers that want to hire legal workers in America. I look at this and I think. this is a reauthorization. It is a status quo. I would have liked to have had an opportunity to upgrade EVerify. because we know a lot of things now that we didnt know when it was put in place. One of the things that we know are 98.6 percent of the names that are submitted in through EVerify on the computer database. and. by the way. I have it in my office and 1 have run it and operated it and I am familiar with its inner workings in a way98.6 percent of the first requests are approved. Remaining in that 1.4 percent are people who are not authorized to work in the United States and that very small piece of the database that does need to be upgraded. 99.9 percent of those that are born in the United States and are American citizens and are legal to work here are approved the first time through. So that remains in those statistics those who arent authorized to work. who may be here illegally. or those who are here legally that arent authorized to work. And the balance of that is mostly people who have gotten married and women who have not changed their name and the database doesnt match. USCIS has brought that up to speed here within the last several months and set it up so that their database search goes out to two different categories. It looks for those name changes that have to be cleaned up. And the other are naturalized citizens. Sometimes the paperwork of naturalized citizens doesnt catch up in time. and there has been a little delay gap that has caused a little bit of error. That gap has been narrowed substantially by I think a good technological move by USCIS. What I would have liked to have seen is that we reauthorize EVerify and provide that employers can simply check those prospective employees and make it a condition that EVerify could be used with a job offer. Not hire the person and wait for the answer in the 8 days to come back but make a job offer conditional to an EVerify approval. And I believe an employer should be able to use EVerify for current employees. Those two changes would have gone a long way towards allowing an employer to verify that their entire employee base is legal. Otherwise. under the circumstances that we have. an employer is compelled to hire someone and then find out if they are legal.