Opponnents say Social Security is not the way to track illegal immigrants

DHS’s plan to tighten the no-match Social Security Number rule has been temporarily put on hold by a federal judge, but the debate about the meit of the system continues. DHS, aware of the fact that many illegal immigrants use fake or forge SSNs to obtain employment, issued a rule which calls for the Social Security Adsminisration to notify employers in the event the SSN of one or more of their employees did not match a real number in the SSA’s data bank. The employer would then have ninety days to set things straight with the employee, and if it canot be done, that is, if the SSN provided by the employee was forged and the mismatch was thus a result not of a typo or some other error, then the employer would have to let the emlpoyee go.

Opponents of the measure question the accuracy of government databases and say U.S. citizens and legal residents could be mistakenly singled out and fired. In illionis, for example, Governor Blagojevich passed a law which prohibits employers in Illinois from participating in a federal program known as E-Verify. That program allows employers to check online an employee’s Social Security number, records from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and photographs. DHS has estimated a 5 percent to 7 percent no-match rate with the E-Verify program, which had been tested across the country and in more than 800 Illinois companies for several years. Local immigration officials said that only 1 percent of those people contested the discrepancy. As many as 70 percent of discrepancies found in the no-match letters the Social Security Administration sent out belong to U.S. citizens or legal residents.

Teresa Puente writes in the Chicago Sun-Times that these odds do not make for effective immigration enforcement policy. The numbers could be mismatched for various reasons — a typographical error in the employee’s name, failure of the employee to report a name change, or a mistake in a W-2 form. Thus, the AFL-CIO, a party to the federal lawsuit to halt the no-match letters, estimates that as many as 600,000 of its workers could receive the letters and be vulnerable to firing. Nationwide, the letters could be sent to about 8 million workers. This is why U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled that the no match letters “would result in irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers.”

Puente writes that the judge was right. “We shouldn’t use Social Security databases rife with error to enforce immigration laws, especially since U.S. citizens and legal residents could be caught in the crossfire, she says. “It makes more sense to use only federal immigration databases, so an employer can verify if someone’s green card is valid. This is a more reliable way to check an immigrant’s work status. For U.S. citizens, passports prove your legal status. Until all the kinks can be worked out of the system, Social Security numbers shouldn’t be used as tools of immigration enforcement.”