Whitman maid uproar shows flaw in immigration system

By Rick Oltman
October 18, 2010
Marin Independent Journal

The Meg Whitman-illegal immigrant housekeeper story continues to entertain. The real story has been missed in the coverage of this gotcha game that is being played for obvious political reasons.

I am not defending Meg Whitman. But, from what I can deduce from all the news coverage, interviews and documents that have been presented on television and on the Internet, she did what she was supposed to do when hiring an employee.

Whatever she believed about her housekeeper’s immigration status is really irrelevant to the employment law. The sad truth is, the law didn’t require her to do very much and that is the real story in this mini-drama.

In 2000, when Whitman hired Nicky Diaz, all she was required to do was look at two pieces of I.D. and if they appeared to be valid, accept them. The employee signed the I-9 under penalty of perjury, and that’s pretty much it. There was no mandatory verification of identity documents in the year 2000 and employers were not required to be experts in document examination, nor should they be.

There is no mandatory verification of identity documents today. But there should be.

Technology continues to advance and 10 years ago anybody with reasonable computer skills could produce a good forgery of just about anything. Given the capabilities of today’s personal computers, there is no document that cannot be counterfeited. There is no secure I.D. What is needed is a secure verification process.

There is a system that can quickly and accurately verify work eligibility. It is called E-Verify and it is run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.

Some 200,000 employers use E-Verify with more signing up every week. In seconds an employer can verify that their new hire is authorized to work in the United States. It has a 99.5 percent accuracy rate and if it reports a "no-match," there is a procedure of getting the correct information into the system.

The only problem is that it is not mandatory for all employers; business or government, it is voluntary.

Whitman was apparently notified by letter of a "no- match" by the Social Security Administration in 2003 because the name and Social Security number did not match. That indicates that she was withholding and not reporting Social Security taxes.

In 2007, there were more than 8 million "no- matches" in the Social Security database and the federal government wanted to mail letters to 140,000 employers, advising them of whose information wasn’t matching up. The mailing of the "no-match" letters was stopped by a lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO, the ACLU and other "end users" of illegal immigrant labor. They did not even want the employers notified about workers whose information didn’t match. The idea was abandoned by the feds in November of 2009.