"Data base error ...no file found" ... You're fired!!!
That's the response millions of America workers could hear if the flawed Shuler-Tancredo immigration bill was to become law.
Requiring over 130 million US workers to prove they have the legal right to work, the SAVE ACT (HR4088) would force employers to submit to using a broken government database, so inaccurate that 12.7 million US-born and legal resident workers are categorized as undocumented workers. Once caught in this maze of bureaucratic incompetency, the SAVE Act would allow only ten days to prove ones eligibility to work or face mandatory termination.
In unsettled economic times, when many Americans are a single paycheck away from economic disaster, the last thing we need is another cynical election-year ploy to play to "the base" at the expense of working families. The American people want real solutions to real problems ... not cheap sound-bites masquerading as legislation.
• Require mandatory use and rapid expansion of the Basic Pilot/E-Verify Electronic Employment Verification system for all employers. The "SAVE Act" would require that within 4 years, all employers in the U.S. – approximately 6 million – use Basic Pilot/E-Verify to verify the work authorization of ALL workers – immigrant and U.S. citizen, new hires and the current workforce. Slightly more than 50,000 employers currently voluntarily use Basic Pilot for new hires – less than one percent of all employers; only 4 percent of all new hires are currently verified through Basic Pilot.
A recent independent evaluation of Basic Pilot/E-Verify concluded that employers currently using the system often misuse it, and that the system requires significant improvements before further expansion. The Basic Pilot/E-Verify system relies heavily on the Social Security Administration (SSA) database that, according to government sponsored studies, contains unacceptably high error rates. SSA estimates that 17.8 million of its records contain errors related to name, date of birth, or citizenship status, and 12.7 million of those records relate to U.S. citizens. DHS databases contain similarly high error rates. If the databases are not dramatically improved, the errors in the SSA database alone could result in 2.5 million workers a year being misidentified as unauthorized for employment or as no-matches. Workers, including U.S. citizens, will get caught in this faulty system and will lose their jobs.
The "SAVE Act" contains no assurances that government databases will be accurate and updated, no privacy protections for the vast amounts of personal information to be handled by employers, and no recourse for workers who are wrongfully denied employment. Most importantly, the "SAVE Act" will not prevent unscrupulous employers from avoiding the system by hiring undocumented workers under the table, thereby growing the informal economy.
• Greatly expand the SSA "no-match letter" program. – a program that was halted by a federal judge in 2007. A no-match occurs when the information in the SSA database does not match the information submitted by an employer on the W-2 form. There are many reasons that workers receive a no-match letter that have nothing to do with immigration, including name changes and employer error in entering data. The "SAVE Act" taps the SSA to play an unprecedented role of reporting and cooperating with the DHS by requiring the SSA to notify employers of ALL no-matches and to notify DHS of all unresolved no-matches. Workers who wrongfully receive a no-match letter will have 10 days to resolve the problem, or be fired. A judge recently found that the DHS no-match rule, which gave employers and workers 90 days to fix errors, placed a large burden on employers, and may result in tremendous harm – including loss of employment – for U.S. workers.
• Link the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security to enforce immigration laws. The "SAVE Act" requires SSA to notify all employees in cases where their social security number (SSN) has been reported by two or more employers and requires those workers to prove they are using a valid SSN and are employed by multiple employers simultaneously. This would be tremendously burdensome for the many workers who hold multiple jobs, and would place additional burdens on the already overstretched and underfunded SSA, resulting in delays providing Social Security benefits to the retired and disabled.
The "SAVE Act" also requires SSA to report all unresolved no-matches and multiple use SSNs to the Department of Homeland Security, increasing the amount of personal taxpayer information about workers (including U.S. citizens) that is shared between government agencies, overriding current laws protecting the privacy of taxpayer information.
Who would get caught up in this bureaucratic nightmare:
Why would a worker receive a no-match letter? According to SSA, there may be several reasons why information submitted for a worker does not match SSA records, including:
A typographical or clerical error was made on a W-4 or W-2 form (such as misspelling a name or transposing a number in the SSN)
The worker’s name has changed due to marriage or divorce
Information provided on the W-4 or W-2 form is incomplete
The worker’s middle name was transposed (for example, "David Juan Jimenez" instead of "Juan David Jimenez").
Back In October, when U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer ruled against the DHS's implementation of it's "No Match Program" for 141,000 social security mismatches, he pointed to the SSA's inability to process the large volume of request the program would require in a timely matter (90 days,) and the number of mistakes in the SSA database as his grounds for preventing the DHS from going forward
Call your representative today and tell them you want them to do the real work you hired them to do and not concentrate on divisive distractions in hopes of saving their political hides in November.
Tell them to concentrate on addressing these economic problems. Tell them you want them to fix health care for all Americans. Tell them you want the education system fixed. Tell them to fix our broken immigration system. Tell them to stop wasting precious lives and needed resources in a war that should never have been authorized and should not be continued.
Tell them you will not settle for half-baked schemes and election-year ploys ... especially at the expense of millions of jobs people need to keep their heads just barely above water in tough economic times.
