An on-line method for verifying the citizenship of prospective employees, cited by Kansas legislators as a reason for killing the state's proposed immigration bill, has been adopted by the federal government.

As the state legislative session waned, members of a conference committee opted to remove a requirement for the E-Verify system from the bill, arguing that it would impose an unfair burden on small businesses. Some members also argued that the system was based on sometimes flawed Social Security records. 

While E-Verify was apparently not up to snuff to some Kansas legislators, apparently it’s good enough for the nation's government.

The White House announced Monday that President George W. Bush had issued an executive order requiring those who do business with the federal government to use the E-Verify system.

The system will be used, in the words of the executive order, to implement "the policy of the executive branch to enforce fully the immigration laws of the United States, including the detection and removal of illegal aliens and the imposition of legal sanctions against employers that hire illegal aliens." 

Kris Kobach, former counsel to the U.S. Attorney General who now teaches law at the University of Missouri Kansas City, says alleged flaws in E-Verify data are overstated, and that the use of the system in Arizona has not only stemmed the flow of illegal aliens into that state, but caused an exodus of illegal aliens who were already there.

Kobach also was on the legal team that defended the new Arizona law in court. 

Earlier this year, Kobach wrote in a newspaper column, “After just six weeks, Arizona's system is already working: Newspapers in the state report that illegals are self-deporting by the thousands. Apartment complexes in Phoenix and Tucson confirm that thousands of tenants have skipped town. Many are returning across the border to Mexico.'

The experience in Arizona, Kobach wrote, "is proof that attrition through enforcement works. The premise is straightforward: The way to solve our illegal-immigration problem is to ratchet up enforcement while making it more difficult for employers to hire illegals."

Kobach wrote that the system coincides with the common sense of most immigrants. "Illegal aliens are rational people," he wrote. "If their chance of being able to work illegally goes down, while the chance of getting detained goes up, at some point the only sensible thing to do is go home."

Kobach noted that the E-Verify is simple and inexpensive. To check on a prospective employee's status, an employer enters the name, date of birth and Social Security number provided and gets a response from a central government database in seconds.

According to Kobach, more than 20,000 businesses nationwide were already using E-Verify voluntarily before the first of the year. Implementation of the Arizona program added 145,000 more.

"Illegals know that E-Verify makes it impossible for them to fabricate Social Security numbers and use fake IDs to obtain jobs," he wrote. "And when the jobs dry up, they leave.”

After the failure of the Kansas bill this year, legislative leaders promised to revisit the illegal immigration issue next year. Whether any bill will be forthcoming - and whether it will include the E-Verify system - is anyone’s guess.

The Week in Review