30 Jan Tell Senators to Keep E-Verify out of Stimulus Bill!

January 30, 2009

Everyone knows the “stimulus” package is a fraud, loaded with every Socialist’s shopping list. The package will fund everything from Amtrak, to climate change research, to a new version of Hitler Youth (Americorp). But hidden down in its depths is something even worse – Government control of hiring called E-Verify.

The Congress couldn’t pass this dangerous legislation on its own, so as usual supporters tack their trash on to “must pass” legislation.

Worse, those supporters are being helped by powerful forces who are selling this monstrosity as a must-have tool to stop illegal immigration. They are lying! E-Verify will do NOTHING to stop illegal immigration.

We must stop E-verify!!

Here are the facts:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (HR1, S336), or so-called economic stimulus bills, contain an earmark to renew the fatally flawed E-Verify program in the United States for another five years beyond it’s scheduled expiration date in March of this year. This very dangerous program must be stricken from any Senate version of the stimulus bill.

E-Verify has nothing to do will illegal immigration and everything to do with global surveillance and total government control of your lives. The Senate loves immigration reforms, but E-Verify must be stopped, and we cannot do it without your help!

E-Verify is grossly ineffective in its stated purpose, and as APC has written many times already, E-Verify, once fully-implemented as intended, will require every true American citizen to first receive approval from their federal government before they may be employed in their own country.

NO GOVERNMENT, not local, state, or national, must ever be given total control over whether American citizens can support themselves and their families!

Independent analysis of existing government databases have found unacceptably high error rates. Currently those voluntarily using E-Verify have experienced near double-digit error rates.

Now, this new bill will force more than 7 million employers to verify the legal status of more than 160 million current employees, as well as the millions of future hires. That means that potentially, as many as 17 million citizens and legal US residents will be mistakenly found “ineligible” to work. Besides, illegals and those employers wishing to hire them can simply work under the table, paying cash, hiding the transaction from any official source. Illegals don’t regularly file income taxes, so the hire isn’t hard to hide.

The fact is, illegal immigration is happening because the U.S. government refuses to do its job to secure the border and stop the flood of illegal aliens from rushing across it. Even though Congress has passed legislation demanding that a fence be built, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is dragging its feet, holding up the project. Moreover, DHS is fighting efforts in local communities to allow police to arrest illegals. There is little effort to tighten visa security, or allow law enforcement to track down and deport those who stay here past their allotted time. Those illegals caught committing crimes are still allowed to leave, only to easily and surreptitiously return at their will. The border is a sieve. There is no border control – period.

Rather than work to strengthen the borders and take steps to stop illegals from getting here in the first place, many now seek “internal enforcement” rather than the “rule of law.” In other words, take action after leaving the barn door open.

Instead of doing its job, government now wants to put all the blame and responsibility on American business. Jobs, they say, are the draw to illegals, so business should be the first line of defense. This may sound appealing, but it can have dire consequences if a nation desires to remain free.

Through use of the E-Verify program, an electronic employment verification (EEV) program, DHS proposes employers check the Social Security databases to verify Social Security Numbers to determine if someone is a US citizen. Yet everyone should know by now how thoroughly compromised the Social Security Administration is; identity theft is probably the U.S.’s largest growth industry.

The federal government has proven it has no ability to safeguard the records in its current databases. And the more databases established, the more opportunity for theft. Recently, federal employees have been caught “sneaking a peek” at the passports of a large number of celebrities and even presidential candidates including Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

Moreover, illegal immigration is big business for some very bad people. They have the means to collect social security numbers (think about all those reports of laptops containing personal records including SS numbers being stolen out of cars and air ports). It’s not hard. But if your life depends on its security, then E-Verify is your worst nightmare.

In August of this year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lost a laptop computer which contained the records of 33,000 people who had signed up for its pre-screening program, designed to give travelers quicker access through airport security. The unencrypted information in the database included names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, Social Security numbers, Alien registration numbers, and current credit card numbers.

E-Verify is a sick joke; it not only does not guarantee an applicant has legal authority to work in our country, but legal employees are the ones who will suffer most. If, when applying for a job, a legal American’s name is thrown out of the system, the potential employee has only 8 days to fix the problem. That means taking time to go to the Social Security Office, between the hours of 8:30am and 5:00pm, Monday thru Friday and sitting in an overcrowded, overwhelmed office waiting for a bureaucrat to maybe fix the problem. If they don’t do this they will be fired from their job. This is not how a free society operates.

One of the greatest threats from establishment of a system such as E-Verify is the creation of perhaps unintended results. As Cato’s Jim Harper surmises, “The things to make a system like this impervious to forgery and fraud would convert it from an identity system into a cradle-to-grave biometric tracking system.”

“Mission Creep” is the commonly used description for a program designed for a specific purpose, but is later used for much more. A prime example of mission creep is the Social Security System itself. It was designed specifically as a means for people to deposit money into a government program to provide for their retirement years. Today, there are those who want to take its databank of users and transform it into an identity system to prove American citizenship, using the excuse, “Well, it’s already there!” That’s mission creep.

As reported in the beginning, DHS Secretary Chertoff intends to increase the E-Verify system to include biometric photographs and extended databases. On numerous occasions Secretary Chertoff has expressed his desire to create a national identification card that would include near complete information on its bearer. This would include job, medical, tax, and school records. It would also include biometric and facial recognition, with RFID microchips that could monitor the whereabouts of every American.

E-Verify is one tentacle of the octopus that will be global biometric identification cards and total global surveillance and control! Is it worth it for Americans to endure an existence in a well-controlled matrix of surveillance simply to catch some illegal workers? Communities across the nation are proving that illegals will stop coming here – in fact actually leave – if they are made to feel unwelcome.

E-Verify sets the stage for a national workforce management system with which government can decide who works and who doesn’t. It is designed to ultimately subject all Americans to an intrusive global surveillance system as the information in DHS databanks is being transferred to international systems through such DHS partners as American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

The federal government has been given the mandate by the people to close the borders and keep them out. It doesn’t require cradle-to-grave biometric tracking of every legal American to accomplish that task. Facts show that such “internal enforcement” would not reduce the illegality, it would promote it.

Border security combined with real efforts by the government to keep illegals out of the country will do much more to stop the flood than by chaining American citizens to massive, all knowing surveillance data banks.

In short, E-Verify is part of an emerging surveillance state that can and must be stopped now – before it’s too late!

ACTION TO TAKE

We must counter the massive E-Verify Support effort now flooding Capitol Hill. We must call the Senate and demand that the E-Verify provisions in the stimulus package be removed (Frankly, telling them to trash the whole stimulus package is the best idea, but at least E-Verify must be removed).

• Contact Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Tell him to keep E-Verify, or any component by any name, out of S 331.
  You can phone Senator Reid at (202) 224-3542, fax him at (202) 224-7327, or email him via this web form.

• Contact Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Tell him to keep E-Verify, or any component by any name, out of S 331.
  You can phone Senator McConnell at (202) 224-2541, fax him at (202) 224-2499, or email him via this web form.

• Contact your Senator. Tell them to keep E-Verify, or any component by any name, out of S 331.
  You may reach your Senators by calling (202) 224-2131. A switchboard operator will connect you directly with the Senate office you request.

Visit the American Policy Center website

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