Amendment to Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2010

This motion would have removed an amendment to the appropriation act making the E-Verify program mandatory. The E-Verify program allows employers to electronically verify information workers present to prove employment eligibility by accessing databases maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. Mandating the program in its current form would result in increased discrimination against employment-eligible individuals.[1] It is well-documented that the program jeopardizes workers’ rights and immigrants’ civil liberties because:

• Employers misuse the program to retaliate or discriminate against workers. Employer noncompliance includes pre-employment screening; restricting work assignments or reducing pay based on tentative non-confirmation notices (received by employers when the databases cannot immediately confirm that the worker is employment-eligible); failure to inform workers of their rights under the program; re-verifying the employment eligibility of existing employees without a legitimate or lawful reason; and violating the Immigration and Nationality Act’s antidiscrimination “document abuse” provisions, which prohibit employers from demanding more documents from workers than the law requires to prove their employment authorization.[2]
• The current program has unacceptably high error rates, frequently flagging work-authorized immigrants and U.S. citizens as ineligible for employment. Due to errors in the DHS database, foreign-born workers (including those who have become U.S. citizens) are 30 times more likely than native-born U.S. citizens to be incorrectly identified as not authorized for employment.[3]

For more information

» Visit govtrack.us
Detailed information about the bill, including full text, floor speeches, sponsors and more

» Toggle footnotes

Legend

= vote to fight poverty = vote against fighting poverty = no vote