- Employment Authorization Documents will be issued with a 2 year validity period beginning later this month, doubling the current limit of one year and making stressed out adjustees a lot less stressed. Good job, Mr. Chertoff, given that the promised processing timeframes are rarely realized and a lot of folks have to sit out employment while waiting for the renewal of timely filed EAD extensions.
On State Legislation- Chertoff cited the state of Washington, which is
currently issuing its own version of an approved, enhanced driver’s
license that will be acceptable at the border. New York has announced
that it has completed its business plan to begin producing those
enhanced driver’s licenses. [Comment: I remember when the concept of federal sovereignty would have made this state involvement an outrage in D.C.; talk about a tacit admission of federal failure in immigration...!]
On E-Verify: Mr. Chertoff was positively giddy about the system, calling it "a tremendous success". Unfortunately, his reasoning is a little loopy, and he seems to fail to grasp the connection between increased E-Verify usage and the fact that HSA has terrorized the nation with raids, insuring front page comments. His words:
"The proof of the pudding is the marketplace itself. Every week on average, about a thousand new employers join this program. And I will tell you that at this point, I will estimate that is almost -- maybe actually more than ten percent of the new hires being hired in the United States are currently being run through this E-Verify system...The system works. Of those workers who are legal, 99.5 percent of them roughly are verified essentially instantaneously. And if those workers who have a mismatch -- legal workers who we estimate to be about a half a percent, they are able generally to resolve their issue within less than two days."
[NOTE: I respectfully disagree with Mr. Chertoff and so do all the organizations tracking the system, but it IS improving. Unfortunately, these numbers still represent a small fraction of U.S. employers and E-Verify remains a complex and user-unfriendly application; that's precisely the reason behind the rush to implement full-spectrum compliance tools such as our own i9 Advantage]
On Raids, Enforcement, and Nailing the Big Guys: If there was any hope that in its waning months the Bush Administration was going to lay off the raids and focus on improving employer education, Mr. Chertoff calmly and quickly dispensed with any such illusions:
"Finally, we are going to continue to keep the pressure up on employers and on illegal aliens by bringing significant cases. As you know recently we brought a case against a meat-processing operation in Iowa. Almost 300 immigrants, illegal immigrants pleaded guilty to using fraudulent documents to get their jobs in an Iowa meat-processing plant. That means they took the identities of innocent Americans and misused those identities. And at least in some instances, caused damage to the innocent American whose identity was stolen.
For those who say that we are only focusing on the illegal workers themselves, I point out that last year we had over 90 employers, or those in a supervisory chain who were convicted of crimes. We have had one CEO or President of a company sent to jail for 10 years. We have had recent conviction of a union official from the United Food and Commercial Workers union for his involvement with the activities at --.
We will continue to pursue employers. I know these cases take a
little bit longer. There is a -- it is always more difficult to work up
the chain. I can tell you as an old organized crime prosecutor and as
an old drug prosecutor, you always start with the bottom ring first,
then you work your way up to the top ring. But I guarantee we are
continuing to work on making cases against that top ring and we will do
so whenever the evidence supports bringing that kind of a case."[Emphasis supplied]
No punches pulled there, eh? Here are some interesting excepts from the Q&A that followed:
Question: Secretary Chertoff, about the executive order on E-verify for federal contractors, do you have somewhat of a number of how many contractors that would involve and how many workers potentially?
Secretary Chertoff: I think we were potentially talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of workers. This is going to apply to contractors who are getting a new contract. Once this comes into effect they're going to be required to run all their employees through E-verify. Or if they have a contract and they're going to bring new employees onto the contract, they're going to have to do that.
Since I can' t predict what contracting is going to be like in the next two or three years I can't give you a precise number, but it's going to be at a minimum hundreds of thousands and I think maybe millions of people will be run through that program.
Question: Can you tell us whether this will cover subcontractors as well contractors?
Secretary Chertoff: I think now we're getting into exactly the area where we're going to wind up having to write the detailed regulation. There are all kinds of issues about what the contracting entity is, so we're going to get into all kinds of topics that will be fascinating for the lawyers. But I'm not going to try to give the legal analysis from up here.
The basic principle is this: if you're working for the federal government and you're being paid with federal taxes you ought to make sure that you're employees are obeying federal law when it comes to their employment authorization, and this executive order as implemented in detail by the regulation will do precisely that.
Question: One of -- for one, on the contractors, number one, the E-verify is voluntary? Is it voluntary for them or is it --
Secretary Chertoff: No.
Question: -- going to be mandatory for them?
Secretary Chertoff: No, for federal contractors who are getting new contracts who are putting new employees on existing contracts, it's going to be -- it's not going to be voluntary. They will have to do it as a condition of getting the contract.
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