July 9, 2009

By JULIA PRESTON

The Obama administration will require businesses that win federal contracts to use a government electronic database system to verify that their employees have legal immigration status to work in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Wednesday.

After a six-month review, Homeland Security officials decided to go ahead with a worker-verification plan based on the electronic system, called E-Verify. The system, which the Bush administration sought to put into effect in its final months, is meant to prevent federal contractors from hiring illegal immigrants.

At the same time, Homeland Security officials said they would drop another Bush administration proposal that would have forced employers to fire any workers whose Social Security information did not match the records of the Social Security Administration. That measure, called the no-match rule, had been challenged in federal court by immigrant advocates and businesses, who said the Social Security database contained errors that could have cost thousands of legal workers their jobs.

Administration officials said the court battle over the no-match rule, which never went into effect, would now end.

The move to expand the use of E-Verify reflects the Obama administration’s strategy of keeping up the pace of immigration enforcement while weighing whether to push for an overhaul this year that would give legal status to millions of illegal workers, officials said.

But the E-Verify system has also been criticized by immigrant advocacy groups and is facing a challenge in federal court by the United States Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, who say the databases it relies on are also full of errors.

“It’s the wrong move at the wrong time” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, one of the groups that challenged the no-match rule. While welcoming the cancellation of that rule, Ms. Hincapié said errors in the E-Verify system could lead to legal workers, including citizens, being fired in the midst of the recession.

Unlike the no-match rule, E-Verify does not rely only on Social Security records, but also searches Homeland Security immigration records. Last year, the system expanded to include information about immigrants who became citizens.

Homeland Security officials said that as a result of recent improvements to the E-Verify system, 96.9 percent of workers who submitted identity information from October to December last year were immediately verified as eligible to work.

Until now, E-Verify has been voluntary, used mainly by employers to check the legal status of workers at hiring. Officials said that under the new regulation, to take effect on Sept. 8, contractors would have to verify all workers, including current employees, when they were awarded work by the federal government.

Illegal immigrants have often presented false Social Security numbers when seeking jobs.

Angelo I. Amador, executive director for immigration policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said that while businesses would like to have a reliable national system to confirm workers’ status, they objected to being required to use E-Verify, which was set up to be voluntary. Mr. Amador said that Intel, the computer chip maker, had reported finding errors in 13 percent of E-Verify responses to queries it made for current employees.

Support for a mandatory federal worker verification system is growing in Congress. Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who heads the judiciary subcommittee on immigration, has called for a biometric system to check every worker, including Americans, and on Wednesday the Senate approved an amendment by Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, to extend E-Verify permanently.