Obama: E-Verify "Riddled with Errors"

According to President Barack Obama, E-Verify is "riddled with errors." [Obama Says E-Verify an Effective Tool but Needs to be Perfected, FoxNewsLatino, June 30, 2011]

At a White House conference last month, Obama insisted that E-Verify still needs to be perfected and safeguards must be added to make the online system more accurate.

Said Obama: "We don't want to expose employers to the risk where they end up rejecting a qualified candidate for a job because [E-Verify] says that the person is an illegal immigrant. The goal right now is to see if we can perfect the E-Verify system."

Obama's misinformation about E-Verify was part of his response to a reporter's question asking if he would veto a mandatory E-Verify bill, House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith’s Legal Workforce Act, unless it was made part of a broader immigration reform plan.

Without directly answering the question, Obama used his bully pulpit to stress what he perceives as the importance of comprehensive immigration reform—his usual smoke and mirrors.

"E-Verify can be an important enforcement tool if it is not riddled with errors," Obama added. "What I don't want is a situation in which employers are forced to set up a system that they can't be certain works."

But according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which
manages E-Verify within the Department of Homeland Security, the program’s accuracy rate is above 99. 5 percent; 97.4 percent of employees are automatically confirmed as "work authorized" within 24 hours. Many receive their confirmations instantly.

Among those who don’t receive instant "work authorized" status, most fail to report back to work, a sure sign they are illegal aliens. Others need only to correct minor errors on their Social Security data and can remain employed during that process.

E-Verify is hugely popular with employers. More than 250,000 American businesses have signed up voluntarily for E-Verify and another 1,300 new organizations join each week.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ June report, 14.1 million Americans are jobless.; 22 million want but cannot find full time jobs. In June, the economy added only a paltry 18,000 jobs.

When the United States president purposely misleads the public about E-Verify’s most important feature–accuracy—it’s little wonder that the struggle to regain jobs that displaced Americans have lost to illegal aliens is so uphill.