Get in line! Will Americans have to prove their right to work via an error-plagued database?

• Author: Howley, Kerry

When comprehensive immigration reform crashed in 2007, federal and state legislators searched the remains for salvageable pieces. Some picked up the border wall, others legalization of undocumented workers. In Arizona, lawmakers seized on E-Verify.

Formerly known as Basic Pilot, E-Verify is a federal program that employers can use to check the employment status of new hires against federal databases run by the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. For most employers, it's just an option, but in January the state of Arizona began forcing everyone within state lines to run new hires by the feds. The state is ahead of the game; in June President Bush signed an executive order requiring that all federal contractors sign up, and various congressmen are pushing to make E-Verify mandatory for the nation's 6 million employers.

Francisco Romero thinks everyone ought to consider slowing down a bit. Romero is a legal Arizona resident who says he has been fired--twice--based on E-Verify--related blunders. "I have been a citizen for 12 years!" exclaims the construction worker, who spent months shuttling between the Social Security Administration and human resource offices trying to obtain permission to work. He was able to get back on the job site only after a community advocate took up his case and hacked through the verification labyrinth.

The federal data, as Romero could tell you, have some problems. The Social Security Administration estimates that 17.8 million (or 4.1 percent) of its records contain discrepancies. About 5-3 percent of queries to E-Verify come back as "tentative nonconfirmations"; workers must then either schlep to the Social Security Office to prove their status or go underground. Many of the citizens forced to request federal permission to work will be women who took their husbands' names and thus have outdated Social Security records; others will simply be victims of bad Social Security data, bad Homeland Security data, or their employers' fat fingers. While native-born workers have had their...