House and Senate finding common ground on E-Verify

  F*ck the 5th Amendment. We have to do something to run all the Mexicans out of America.

I don't feel that way but the racist tyrants in the US Congress do.

Source

House and Senate finding common ground on E-Verify

By Erin Kelly Republic Washington Bureau Wed Aug 7, 2013 10:59 PM

WASHINGTON -- While the Senate and House remain far apart on the best way to overhaul the nation’s broken immigration system, there is strong agreement on the need for an electronic employment-verification system that would affect all U.S. workers and impose huge new penalties on employers who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants.

The Migration Policy Institute at New York University’s School of Law released a side-by-side comparison of the sweeping immigration-reform bill passed by the Senate in June and the five House bills that have passed key committees this year.

The one area where the two chambers’ approaches are almost identical are provisions making it mandatory for employers nationwide to check all new employees through a federal database known as E-Verify.

All employees, including U.S. citizens, would have to undergo the check when they apply for a job to ensure they are legally eligible to work here.

“The workplace will change fundamentally for all workers if this becomes law,” said Muzaffar Chishti, the institute’s director.

Currently, the system is voluntary for most employers. A few states, including Arizona, require employers to use the system under state law. Some federal contractors must use the system.

Under existing law, employers who knowingly hire an undocumented immigrant are subject to minimum fines of $375 per worker for their first offense and $4,300 for their third offense, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Those fines would swell under the Senate-passed bill to $3,500 to $7,000 per worker for a first offense and $10,000 to $25,000 for the third violation.

The bill passed by the House Judiciary Committee would impose fines of $2,500 to $5,000 for the first offense. The penalty for the third violation would be the same as the Senate bill.

“There is a big ramping-up of penalties in both bills,” Chishti said.

The Senate bill gives the Department of Homeland Security four years to improve the current E-Verify system and implement it nationwide.

The House bill gives the DHS only two years, but it permits deadline extensions, if needed.

The House bill would allow private contractors to run the database, while the Senate requires federal employees to operate it.

The rare agreement between the two chambers on an immigration issue reflects bipartisan support for trying to reduce future illegal immigration by making it more difficult for undocumented workers to find jobs.

But big differences between the Senate and House approaches to immigration reform still make an overall compromise tough, especially on how to deal with the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, MPI experts said.

“It is certainly the most politically difficult issue for the House,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow and director of the institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program.

The Senate bill would offer many of those immigrants a 13-year pathway to citizenship if they underwent background checks, paid fines and back taxes and learned English and American civics.

House leaders are working on a much narrower bill, tentatively called the Kids Act, which would offer citizenship only to certain young immigrants brought to the United States as children.

Republican leaders of the House Judiciary Committee also have raised the possibility of offering legal status, but not citizenship, to adult immigrants who entered the United States illegally or overstayed their visas.

That idea was rejected in the Senate and has been denounced by most Democrats and immigrant-rights groups, which argue that it would create a permanent underclass of U.S. residents cut off from the American dream no matter how hard they worked.

The Senate in June passed a sweeping immigration overhaul that would create a pathway to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants, double the number of Border Patrol agents on the southwestern border, change the visa system to bring in more high-tech workers, and require employers to use the federal E-Verify system.

The House has been taking a piecemeal approach, passing a bipartisan border-security bill out of the House Homeland Security Committee and four other bills out of the House Judiciary Committee.

Although details vary between the Senate and House bills, they agree on certain key elements beyond E-Verify, including stronger security on the southwestern border, an increase in the number of visas for high-tech workers, and the need for a new program to bring in agricultural workers for both seasonal and year-round work on American farms.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the architects of the Senate-passed immigration bill, said Wednesday that he believes the House and Senate can reach a compromise if the House passes legislation.

Senate and House negotiators would iron out differences in their legislation and come up with a final bill.

“A couple of their pieces are very similar to our bill on agriculture and high tech, letting high-tech people in,” Schumer said in an interview on CNN. “Others are going to be different, but if we can get together at the end of day and compromise, that will be a good thing.”

Congress is in recess until Sept. 9, and the House is not expected to take up immigration reform until October at the earliest because it must first deal with pressing budget issues.

“I actually am optimistic that we will get this done,” Schumer said.

“I have had a lot of discussions with various members of both parties in the House. Things are moving in the right direction.”

 

Papers Please