Obama’s Immigration Chief Validates E-Verify & Suggests Stronger Future

Janet Napolitano has raised hopes for better immigration enforcement many times in her career and then disappointed those cheering her on, but I want to believe my eyes/ears that she signaled a major commitment to E-Verify this week. It appears the Obama Administration is finally starting to separate itself from the most extreme open-borders elements of the Democratic Party. Napolitano’s testimony before Congress was most significant — and encouraging.

Napolitano appeared at separate hearings of the Senate and House committees on Homeland Security and said:

I’m a big supporter of E-Verify.

You love us!  Now, how about some evidence, or at least some specifics to your promise to protect American workers from having unscrupulous employers hire illegal foreign workers?

E-Verify is an essential tool for employers to maintain a legal workforce.

— Napolitano to Congress

Oooh, that’s nice. You have a reason for loving E-Verify — and, hence, loving us regular Americans. 

(E-Verify is) a cornerstone of workplace enforcement across the country.

— Napolitano to Congress

Shocking! 

I know that I shouldn’t be shocked that the woman with the chief responsibility for enforcing immigration laws actually understands and believes in her chief enforcement tool. But given the anti-E-Verify efforts of the Senate Democratic leadership the last year, and the less than enthusiastic support for E-Verify by the new Obama Administration to this point — well, Napolitano’s comments this week were very, very refreshing.

Senate Majority Leader Reid has allowed the radical open-borders fringe of his Party to block long-term extension of the E-Verify program. It needed to be authorized last November. Sen. Menendez (D-N.J.) blocked a vote because the Senate wouldn’t agree to increase new foreign workers and their dependents by a half-million in 2009.  Reid refused to stand up to Menendez but allowed E-Verify to be extended to March of this year. When Sen. Sessions (R-Ala.) pushed an amendment in February to save the program and extend it for years, Reid made sure that the amendment was tabled, but gave a stay of execution, extending E-Verify until the end of September.

Until this week, the Obama Administration has not weighed in on the future of E-Verify.

The open-borders rabble in Congress don’t even want E-Verify’s electronic verification of workers even after an amnesty. The more moderate amnesty supporters are willing to have E-Verify after the amnesty but are willing to kill it if an amnesty doesn’t pass.

Napolitano’s testimony this week surely sounded like an unequivocal endorsement of continuing E-Verify totally separate from what might happen with the amnesty fight.

She noted that the Obama budget provides funding for three more years. And it adds $12 million to provide $112 million for the program during the next fiscal year. 

More than 124,000 businesses are running their new hires through the internet-based identification program that enables employers to check whether an employee is authorized to work.

A thousand new businesses a week are signing up because the employers already using it love E-Verify for protecting them from breaking federal laws and for helping ensure that they can keep the workers they hire.

Use of the system has grown especially fast since a number of states have started requiring some or all of their governments, contractors and businesses to use E-Very. (Take a look at our map of these states.)

We hope that the use will soon become so common in business communities all across America that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will finally stop fighting it and allow a federal mandate for all employers to use it.

That day will be much, much closer if a last-year Bush Administration rule is allowed to take effect, requiring all federal contractors to use E-Verify.

Pres. Obama has seemed ambivalent or even hostile about that new rule, twice delaying its implementation.

But Napolitano this week indicated that the federal contractor rule should be implemented early summer.

The cheap-labor, open borders groups are in a panic.  Their argument for years has been that the feds could never grow the system fast enough, or that mistakes in the database would lead to Americans losing their jobs, or that the program would be too onerous for business.

As a higher and higher percentage of new hires go through E-Verify, and as the businesses using it continue to laud its efficiency and low cost, and as open-borders advocates continue to fail to find examples of U.S. workers hurt by E-Verify, the dire warnings by the open-borders folks will be seen as empty rhetoric.

With this seeming pragmatic approach to immigration enforcement emerging in the Obama Administration, a lot of extra pressure is developing for congressional Democrats.  Do they want to be seen by their constituents as clinging to the extremist elements of the Party that favor largescale illegal immigration, or will they move toward the center where Obama and Napolitano seem to be moving on E-Verify?

You will know whether your congress(wo)man is an extremist or a pragmatic protector of U.S. workers by whether he/she co-sponsors the SAVE Act which Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) intends to introduce soon.  It would over a few years phase in E-Verify so that every single worker in America has to be run through it, to open up jobs for the 13 million unemployed Americans.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA