USCIS Says E-Verify is Underutilized
The Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Alejandro Mayorkas told The Washington Times that the E-Verify workplace verification system can handle many more requests than it currently does. The agency, which is under the Department of Homeland Security, oversees the E-Verify system. Currently, only companies that contract with the federal government and a employers in a handful of states are mandated to use E-Verify.
"We have the capacity currently to process far more queries than we currently handle. And so we can right now handle the expansion of E-Verify to additional states. But if it was mandated across the country, it would take us some time to ramp up for that exponentially greater volume," said Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles legal-immigration benefits.
A bill that would make E-Verify mandatory for all employers in the United States, H.R.2885, the Legal Workforce Act, was passed by the House Judiciary Committee in September of last year, but is awaiting consideration from the House Ways & Means Committee that oversees the Social Security Administration.
In 2011, E-Verify processed 17 million queries.
Last month, USCIS opened up the E-Verify Self Check that allows U.S. citizens and legal immigrants to check their worker authorization before applying for a new job. The Self Check allows individuals to find out if they would receive an automatic confirmation or a tentative non-confirmation and how to clear up the discrepancies if it's a tentative non-confirmation. Since opening up Self Check to the public, more than 100,000 people have used the tool.
For more information, see The Washington Times.
To search for companies currently using E-Verify, visit NumbersUSA.org.