Months after Northwestern’s announcement that all employees must complete E-Verify, an electronic I-9 form, none of the more than 13,000 employees who have completed it have been fired, said Pamela Beemer, associate vice president for Human Resources.
At NU and nationally, people have raised concerns about its effectiveness and the message it sends.
“The issue that I find challenging about E-Verify is that it assumes that no one is a citizen,” Rabbi Josh Feigelson of NU Fiedler Hillel said. “It’s unfortunate we live in a time and age where we are suspecting our citizens of not being citizens.”
Operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, E-Verify was created in 1996 to identify illegal workers.
Employees must fill out an electronic form, then attend one of several workshops to show the proper identification documents to be verified as work-eligible.
According to a University announcement, compliance with the system helps the University avoid losing federal research money. NU signed a contract with E-Verify on Sept. 30, 2009.
Federal law requires NU to submit only new hires and those working under federal contracts. Other schools, such as the University of Chicago, have not implemented the system on a wide scale.
“Every university has to make their own decision about how they manage the processes,” Beemer said. “We want to be very cautious.”
NU didn’t want to take the risk of allowing someone to slip through the system and jeopardize research money the University receives, she said.
Submitting employees to the verification system raises a question of privacy rights, Feigelson said.
“I don’t have a problem with the University doing it,” he said. “I have a problem with there being a complete lack of conversation about it.”
The system’s requirements are difficult for those who may not have a passport or driver’s license, Feigelson said.
NU Staff Advisory Council chairwoman Lynn Steiner said E-Verify isn’t an issue on NUSAC’s radar.
“The main concern people have is about the time it takes,” Steiner said. “I went through the process myself and it literally takes just a few minutes.”
Steiner had not heard federal law didn’t require all NU employees to complete E-Verify, but submitting all workers avoids discrimination, she said.
Feigelson said he opposes the philosophical statement E-Verify makes more than the system’s practical issues.
Alex Nowrasteh, a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in immigration policy, said it’s “absurd” for workers to ask permission to make a living in today’s weakened economy.
“It’s a terrible thing that universities and other organizations across the country are implementing it,” he said. “As a tool for weeding out undocumented workers, it’s ineffective, and it raises the question of citizens having to ask the government for permission to work.”
The system fails to catch 54 percent of illegal workers and has a 4.1 percent inaccuracy rate overall, according to a recent study by Westat.
If workers fail to be verified, they can go through an appeals process. If they choose not to contest, they legally must be fired, at which point many employers hire them off the books, Nowrasteh said.
There have been situations when NU employees received a tentative non-confirmation due to an incorrectly typed Social Security number or an administrative error and have had to correct the situation, Beemer said.
“I don’t want to suggest that everyone has flown through without any issues cropping up,” she said.
All problems have been resolved, Beemer said.
The University set May 31 as the deadline for having all employees complete E-Verify, Beemer said. At that time, NU will compile a list of who hasn’t fulfilled the requirements and reach out to them, she said. About 3,000 employees have yet to be verified, she said.
Some worry E-Verify will infringe on employee and citizen rights as politicians continue “grasping at straws” to show progress, Nowrasteh said.
“All of the immigration reforms include expanding the system to every worker in the United States,” he said. “So this issue is not going away.”
