NW Riverside News

On April 19, the House Judiciary Committee approved H.R. 2640, the Border Security and Enforcement Act, legislation that included the Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 319), which was introduced by Congressman Ken Calvert (CA-41) earlier this year. The Legal Workforce Act ensures American jobs go to citizens and legal workers by requiring U.S. employers to check the work eligibility of all future hires through the E-Verify system.

“We must support American workers by verifying their employment eligibility,” said Rep. Calvert. “Requiring the use of E-Verify is a common-sense step we must take to fix our broken immigration system. America is a nation of immigrants, and we want people to come to our nation through our legal immigration pathways. The passage of the Border Security and Enforcement Act is essential to gaining control of our borders and the enforcement of our immigration policies, which is critical to having a functional immigration system.”

In 1996, Rep. Calvert authored the law that created the E-Verify program, the only tool available for employers to check the legal work status of newly hired employees. U.S. law requires employers hire a legal work force but before E-Verify, there was no viable system to check the legal work status of new employees. Rep. Calvert has worked to expand E-Verify and pushed to make it mandatory.

E-Verify, operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), checks the social security numbers of new hires against Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security records to help ensure that they are eligible to work in the U.S. The program is free to employers, quickly confirms the eligibility of employees with 99.8% accuracy and takes less than two minutes to use. Over one million American employers currently use E-Verify. According to USCIS, 22 states require E-Verify for some or all employers.

Issues: Homeland Security and Illegal Immigration

Original source can be found here.