American authorities have decided to catch all illegal workers using the Internet.
Among them, 57% of people who illegally entered the United States from Mexico, 24% defectors from other Latin American countries, 9% from Asian countries, and 6% from Eastern Europe.
The entry into the labor market of millions of illegals, whose labor is sometimes paid 50% lower than that of U.S. citizens, is beneficial to employers on the one hand. But on the other hand, it increases the overall unemployment rate. Today, according to the government Department of Homeland Security, there are 169,000 contractor companies working under contracts with federal firms. The total size of their labor force is 3.8 million people.
“From now on, for the first time, there is an opportunity to conduct a detailed and scrupulous check of these companies in terms of their compliance with hiring rules for hundreds of thousands of people,” said Bill Wright, a representative of the government Department of Homeland Security. “For this check and constant monitoring of their activities in the future, we now have a special electronic system.”
This electronic system, which has been connected to the Internet, is called E-Verify, or “Verify.” It can indeed verify the identity of immigration documents, personal identification, citizenship status, and federal documents that give people who are not yet citizens the right to work. “This system will allow firms to hire only those people whose documentation legality is proven by the electronic system,” said the head of the government Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.
In accordance with the rules that took effect last week, contractors have 30 days to register their company in the E-Verify system. And 90 days to prepare the information required by this system about new and previously hired workers and employees.
Boris VINOKUR.
Novye Izvestia