Should the Texas Legislature Re-Address E-Verify Bills in Special Session - TexasGOPVote's Debate on Houston's Fox 26

Should the Texas Legislature revive the debate over mandatory e-Verify bills in this special session of the Texas Legislature? This is the question I discussed with Fox 26's Melinda Spalding and FosterQuan Law Firm's Gordon Quan last night on a "Fox in Focus" segment of the newscast.

Surprisingly, Mr. Quan and I were both against the legislature re-opening the discussion of this matter but for different reasons. Both of us agree, e-Verify is a flawed system however.

 

In answer to Melinda's question about why I do not support e-Verify as a mandatory system for all employers I said, "The reason I am not in favor of it is because it doesn't work. It is inaccurate at doing the very thing it is designed to do. Everybody talks about the 96% or 98% accuracy rate of e-Verify, but what it misses is in identifying the workers that are unauthorized to work in this country. It misses those people 54% of the time."

I continued saying, "It would be better to go after one of the big job magnets for illegal aliens, which is employers who pay cash under the table or who misclassify employees and hire them as independent contractors rather than employees." 

A Conservative website, Human Events reports, "United States Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS) noted that 6.2 percent of all E-Verify queries involve an illegal alien new hire.  Primarily due to identity fraud, E-Verify only correctly found that unauthorized workers --not all workers -- were not work authorized about half (54 percent) of the time,” USCIS said.

“As a result, the 54 percent statistic relates only to the 6.2 percent figure . . . and means that of all E-Verify queries, only approximately 3.3 percent are for unauthorized workers that were incorrectly found work authorized.” In other words, illegal aliens whose new employer ran them through E-Verify two years ago had a 50-50 chance of beating the system and keeping the American jobs they came to steal. But they made up only roughly 3 percent of all E-Verify worker queries. And the reason is they’re ID thieves."

Mr. Quan responded, "I think it is a poorly conceived idea. There are so many legal workers who are being denied employment because they aren't in the system properly. When a person becomes a permanent resident or becomes a citizen, often times their name is not changed as to their immigration status. Also, when women get married, they often do not have their new name in the system. This happens all the time. In fact, a friend of mine who works in Congress could not get verified to work in her own job with the Justice Department because her name was improperly in the system."

I concluded my discussion with a mention of the the new leadership in our legislature from the Republican Hispanic Conference. "The House Republican Hispanic Conference came forward with a resolution calling for strong border security and identification process illustrates a good way of moving the ball forward on our issues." 

We need to get about the issue of securing our nation's border, identifying all people who are in this country illegally and effectively removing those illegal aliens who have committed additional criminal acts or who have been previously deported and have re-entered our nation as felons.

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