Obama drops rule aimed at immigrants' bosses

SFGate.com
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, October 9, 2009

(10-08) 13:50 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- The Obama administration has repealed a rule that would have threatened employers with prosecution unless they fired workers whose Social Security numbers did not match entries in a government database, ending a two-year battle in a San Francisco federal court.
Although the Department of Homeland Security formally withdrew the "no-match" rule Wednesday, the administration is supporting another program enabling employers to check workers' names against electronic records that are supposed to screen out illegal immigrants.
That program, E-Verify, is voluntary for most employers but mandatory for the 170,000 companies holding federal contracts and for their subcontractors. This week, a House-Senate conference committee voted to extend E-Verify for three years.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is challenging the scope of the program in a Maryland federal court.
"E-Verify has many of the same problems as no-match," said Chris Calabrese, legislative attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which took part in the San Francisco lawsuit. Although employers are not threatened with prosecution under the program, he said, thousands of workers are in danger of losing their jobs based on "databases that are not terribly accurate."
But the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports restrictions on immigration, said the government has found that E-Verify is accurate in 99.6 percent of cases. The group criticized the House-Senate conference committee for refusing to make the program permanent.
The three-year extension is "further evidence of the Obama administration's and the congressional leadership's effort to raise a smokescreen while it dismantles all effective controls against illegal immigration," the organization said.

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