E-Verify and other jokes

I listen to C-Span every morning and hear the occasional caller talk about how E-Verify will solve our illegal immigration problems. I even spoke to Georgia’s gubernatorial candidate, Casey Cagle about it. He claimed it would. Obviously, he hadn’t actually read about it, but it sounded good so he pitched it as the solution to everything. It isn’t.

Added, August 11, 2019. You may remember the story of the immigration raids in Mississippi a few days ago that caught nearly 700 poultry plant workers, a great source of concentrated low income workers and easy for our government to sweep up lots of people with very little effort. I noted that the companies claimed that they complied with E-Verify… that you’ll read about in this article. They know that it’s a joke; I know it and once you read this, you’ll know it. Complying is easy as it’s an illusion, designed by our politicians to be like Swiss cheese, riddled with holes. Our politicians pretend to have fixed the immigration problem, (like the useless, expensive wall) but are only interested in pretending to fix the immigration problem as that’s all the public wants to hear.

The solution to our immigration problem is ridiculously simple, but our politicians don’t really want to fix the problem, but create the illusion they are. Why? Because we depend on undocumented people to keep wages down. If inflation increases because we don’t have a very low wage base, they risk losing their congressional jobs. That is too big a risk, so they pretend to fix the problem. And most of the public nods approval and reelects them.

The sad thing about E-Verify is that I don’t think anybody has actually read about what it actually is. If they did, they wouldn’t say that it would work as it is. They will say that it’s designed to create the illusion of solving the legal employment problem… that it doesn’t.

Read the E-Verify Wikipedia article here and download the form that employers are supposed to complete –

If you read the E-Verify documentation, it illustrates a laborious manual process to document that a potential employee is legally allowed to work. Why is this almost useless, as designed to be? Manual labor.

According to Wikipedia in 2007, most of the federal government didn’t even use their own system! According to the Inspector General, the Social Security Administration didn’t bother to perform required verification of Social Security numbers of 19 percent of its own new hires during an 18-month period!

It means that the laws were passed to please the voters, and then be ignored or made difficult and expensive to implement. Even Social Security doesn’t appear to flag duplicate Social Security numbers in the system, so that an automatic queries are triggered if one worker in Texas and another in New York, for example, have the same number. Imagine that! I suspect that they don’t notice as they collect additional income, and one of the two people will never collect benefits so its free money.

The problem is that E-Verify is archaic and depends on manual labor, so I developed a much better, easier and cheaper solution that could be implemented in a six-month period.

It’s called a National ID Employment card, complete with a QR code. Any employer ranging from huge to a homeowner who wants his lawn cut can scan the QR code using a Homeland Security issued Android or iPhone app and that potential employee can be instantly verified. It’s so simple, even our government can do it.

People don’t like to have identity cards (forgetting that almost everyone has a drivers license with photo, address and other information,) but in 2019 everything you do is being recorded and filed away whether you like it or not. If you don’t believe it, check your travels, for example, that Google Timeline keeps close track of. I’m sure that our government unlawfully taps the entire Internet backbone fiber optic cables to capture everything we do in the United States, packaged as “…for your own security.”

So get used to it.

The system will make a very secure internet connection to Homeland Security’s data center using the potential employer’s cell phone, probably in Utah where the NSA is storing everything we do electronically, and provide a near instant photograph of the cardholder (to check for fake ID cards), and an employment check mark. Green means employ, red, don’t employ and a yellow question mark for additional investigation.

It can also be required for the person to hold the ID next to their face, so if the ID is fake, the person’s actual photograph is recorded by our government and facial recognition software will identify who it is… forever.

If you don’t use or ignore the required card check and you’re caught? $1,000 first offense fine for a homeowner, $5,000 for small business owners, $50,000 for mid-sized companies and $100,000 for large companies. The fines go up from there and can even lead to prison time for offenders who don’t get the financial message. As our government prefers money, all of the money should go to charity to stop government abuse of the system.

As I wrote above, the problem is that if cheap illegal labor was actually blocked, then our cost of living, unemployment rate and inflation will increase. That’s very bad for our politicians, who spend much of their time working on their next election. Any risk to that is a serious matter.

They do not want to take their faces out of the public trough until they have a large, vested, federal pension, consulting jobs lined up and maybe even seats on the boards of companies that they have helped.

So don’t look to an actual solution for a long time, just empty noise.