Immigration Crackdown: Few businesses using feds' E-Verify tool to check workers' immigration status

Oh, the politics of immigration law! Progressives criticize E-Verify for making numerous errors in identification and thus targeting legal workers. Here agriculture businesses tell why they don't like it. They say that they need "illegal" workers because they can't get U.S. ciitzens to do the work.

Few businesses using feds' E-Verify tool to check workers' immigration status - Politics AP - MiamiHerald.com: "Businesses have a free, simple way to check that their new hires are legal. Although far from perfect, it could reduce the lure of employment that draws illegal immigrants, experts say. (The only apparent "expert" this article identifies is a spokesperson for the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy organization which supports stricter immigration enforcement.)


But most employers who depend on illegal workers -- including the vast majority of agriculture businesses in the Central Valley (of California) -- won't use it. And Congress, under pressure from business leaders, refuses to make them -- despite a clear voter mandate to stop illegal immigration.

Called E-Verify, the online government program uses records from the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to instantly check an employee's legal status after being hired. When word gets around that an employer uses the program, illegal immigrants stop applying, (unidentified) experts say.

Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, an association of agriculture businesses in the Western U.S., acknowledged as much. "It may work for Costco, but Costco doesn't have the problem I have" -- a shortage of legal residents willing to work in agriculture, he said.

The debate over E-Verify has put local conservative groups in a tricky position: They oppose illegal immigration, but they support businesses that rely on illegal immigrants." Nov. 15, 2010, Fresno Bee/AP