E-Verify being pushed in Jeff. Parish to weed out illegals

10th June 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer

Less than two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the a state’s right to mandate businesses use of the online E-Verify system to determine if their employees are legal residents of the U.S., the heads of the advocacy organization, Citizens for Good Government have asked the Jefferson Parish council to do the same.

The group’s chair and vice chair, Margaret Baird and Margie Seemann, respectively, have asked Jeff President John Young and the Parish Council to mandate E-Verify for any business that seeks a parish contract.

E-Verify is a free, Internet-based system operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in partnership with the Social Security Administration that certifies em­ployee citizenship status. E-Verify is currently free to employers and is available in all 50 states.

Failure to mandate the use of E-Verify in Jefferson Parish means, in the Citizens’ view, that legal U.S. residents — particularly the nearly one-third of the Jefferson population who are African-American and whose young people currently face large-scale unemployment — are denied economic opportunities in Parish work that should be rightfully theirs.

“We need jobs for people who are here legally,” Margaret Baird explained to The Louisiana Weekly, “There are people who would like to work. There are a lot of local African-Americans who would like to work, and they can’t get jobs.”

The reason, she explained, is that many contractors, particularly in the construction industry, will hire illegal immigrants at lower wages than the going rate for entry level workers. This particularly impacts young African-American males seeking to break into the job market. In a parish whose population almost directly reflects the state’s racial breakdown, that means that influx of illegal immigration, particularly post-Katrina, impacts the very ability of young Black men to get jobs.

The Jefferson Council, Margie Seemann maintained, needs to take a stand on this issue, now that the Supreme Court has ruled that states (and by corollary counties) may. However, so far, no councilperson nor the Parish President has endorsed mandating that the E-Verify system be a requirement for companies that wish to do business with the state’s largest parish.

“The council has not proposed an ordinance. We sent faxes to parish attorney and John Young, on Tuesday. Margaret spoke about this on Tuesday [night at the Council meeting] as well as back in March of 2010. We’re just going to keep pushing this until they do something.”

A new state law currently under consideration, SB66, would require that any company who contracts with Louisiana must use E-Verify to certify that their employees are legally resident. However, a provision that would have mandated parishes have the same requirements for their contractors was stripped from an early version of the bill, according to Baird.

“If companies are hiring illegals,” she explained, “they should be punished. There are civil and criminal penalties for companies that break the law repeatedly.” The fact that often local and state governments turn a proverbial blind eye to companies that hire cheaper illegal workers to bolster their profit margins should not be tolerated, she maintained.

The Citizens for Good Govern­ment noted in its literature that the group only seeks the requirement on companies that do business with Jefferson Parish — unlike Missis­sippi, where all businesses — government contractors and private sector operators alike — regardless of size, are required to use E-Verify to confirm the legality of employees as of July 1, 2011.

Col. Vic Lent, a 30-year veteran construction manager, both working for the federal government at the Pentagon and in private work here in Louisiana calls the internet based E-Verify “one of the simplest government websites to navigate that he has ever visited”. The free program run by the United States government compares information from an employee’s Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9, which Seemann explains every employer must fill out upon hiring a new employee, to data from U.S. government records.

As such, E-Verify provides an automated link to federal databases to help employers determine employment eligibility of new hires and the validity of their Social Security numbers. If the information matches, that employee is eligible to work in the United States. If there’s a mismatch, E-Verify alerts the employer and the employee is allowed to work while he or she resolves the problem; they must contact the appropriate agency to resolve the mismatch within eight federal government work days from the referral date.

The program is operated by the Department of Homeland Security (of which USCIS is part) in partnership with Social Security Administration. According to the DHS website, more than 238,000 employers now use E-Verify. Over 1,400 companies enroll in the program every week.

Beyond Mississippi, Georgia, Utah, and, of course, Arizona, have mandated E-Verify in their states. What spawned the Supreme Court case was a stand by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama Administration that immigration enforcement was the exclusive purview of the federal government. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision that broke down on ideological lines, ruled against the Administration. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, noted the 10th Amendment implications of such a position would infringe on a state’s sovereignty. As long as a state (or corresponding legal jurisdiction, like a parish or county) did violate federal law, it was in compliance. Since E-Verify is a federal program to start with, the Chief Justice found it hard to make the case that a state mandating usage of the DHS internet program violated federal law.

The Obama Administration and critics of E-Verify argue that the mandated use could lead to profiling. Mandates, they maintain, should only be part of a comprehensive immigration reform.

The racial backlash has made many politicians wary of jumping into the E-Verify controversy, the challenge that the Citizens for Good Government now encounter in asking the Jefferson Council for an ordinance mandating the usage of E-Verify.

None of that should matter in Seemann’s view.

“To not verify the status is just criminal,” she explained to this newspaper. Literally, as companies are subject to federal fines, and owner to jail time, if they knowingly hire illegal aliens. E-Verify merely removes the doubt, according to the Citizens leadership.

“We feel that Jefferson parish has to get on the bandwagon,” Baird outlined. “It has nothing to do with race. Any person who is here illegally should not be hired…It has nothing to do with race, it has to do with illegality. E-verify provides a giant step towards solving the immigration problem.”

“It was May 26th, just last week, that the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s law,” she continued, “Now that the Supreme Court has upheld it, there is no reason for every state using it.”

LA Senate Bill 66 has passed the upper house with only one dissenting vote and now goes to the House for consideration.

The Jindal Administration has not indicated whether it would sign the Bill.

Attempts to seek comment from Jefferson Parish President John Young on the E-Verify controversy and the status of a local ordinance were unsuccessful.

This article was originally published in the June 6, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper