Despite the ruling by U. S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. last week rejecting a last minute bid for injunctive relief against the Department of Homeland Security's rules requiring all companies contracting with the federal government to clear all present and future employees through the federal E-verify system to see if it is legal for them to work in this country, the legal, political and practical challenges to E-verify will continue for a long time. The system is expected to falsely label as illegal workers about 38,000 people who are actually legally employed here, requiring their employers to spend money, time and effort to get admittedly mistaken government information databases corrected. Furthermore, E-verify does nothing at all to detect the illegal alien working here who has presented false identity documents of a citizen to his or her employer.
What's even more complicated, the E-verify program will expire at the end of this month unless both houses of Congress pass the Homeland Security appropriations bill before September 30, and House and Senate versions of the bill will have to be reconciled in conference committee, because the House version extends E-verify for only two years, while the Senate reauthorization is permanent. It seems silly to require compliance with a system which could expire in three weeks.
Even under the rules which go into force today, employers with government contracts have 30 days to sign up for E-Verify, and 90 days after that to actually check the legal status of people on their payrolls. Why would a company begin that process without waiting to see whether the program will survive beyond the end of this month?
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced today that Congress will need a short term continuing resolution to keep the doors of the federal government open for business after September 30, because neither house will complete all of next year's appropriation bills before the end of this fiscal year. Conference committee work on the four appropriation measures already passed through both chambers is slated to start in a week or two, but with the contentious health care reform debate taking up a lot more time than anyone expected at the beginning of the session, there is no guarantee that E-verify will get formally reauthorized before it expires.
What's even more complicated, the E-verify program will expire at the end of this month unless both houses of Congress pass the Homeland Security appropriations bill before September 30, and House and Senate versions of the bill will have to be reconciled in conference committee, because the House version extends E-verify for only two years, while the Senate reauthorization is permanent. It seems silly to require compliance with a system which could expire in three weeks.
Even under the rules which go into force today, employers with government contracts have 30 days to sign up for E-Verify, and 90 days after that to actually check the legal status of people on their payrolls. Why would a company begin that process without waiting to see whether the program will survive beyond the end of this month?
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced today that Congress will need a short term continuing resolution to keep the doors of the federal government open for business after September 30, because neither house will complete all of next year's appropriation bills before the end of this fiscal year. Conference committee work on the four appropriation measures already passed through both chambers is slated to start in a week or two, but with the contentious health care reform debate taking up a lot more time than anyone expected at the beginning of the session, there is no guarantee that E-verify will get formally reauthorized before it expires.
