Jul 4, 2008 2:35 pm US/Pacific
Santa Clara Co. Supes Oppose Immigrant Workers Law
SAN JOSE (BCN) ―
Santa Clara County supervisors have voted to oppose a federal immigration measure that would verify an employee's legal status because they say the program is based on erroneous, outdated data.
Among the provisions in the Secure America through Verification and Enforcement (SAVE) Act of 2007, supervisors said the measure, H.R. 4088, would expand an electronic verification system critics say is flawed and full of outdated data.
"The SAVE Act's punitive approach fails to fix our larger immigration problems," Supervisor Blanca Alvarado said in a statement. "Hopefully next year Congress and the administration will do what's really necessary; take more concrete, positive steps toward comprehensive immigration reform."
The SAVE Act would require all employers to verify the employment eligibility of all workers by using Basic Pilot/E-Verify, a system that relies heavily on the Social Security Administration database.
Documented workers and naturalized citizens may get mistakenly snagged in the faulty program, supervisors said.
"The SAVE Act would adversely affect all workers," Patricia Diaz, executive director of Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network, said in a statement. "Authorized workers who are foreign-born are 30 times more likely than native-born workers to be incorrectly tagged as unauthorized for employment under the act's E-Verify system. Furthermore, naturalized U.S. citizens are the most likely to be incorrectly identified as unauthorized, compared to 0.1 percent of native-born citizens."
A decrease in federal revenues of more than $17 billion over the 2009-2018 period would likely result, according to an April memo from Peter Orszag, director of Congressional Budget Office. The decrease would result in an increase of undocumented workers being paid outside the tax system, he said in the memo.
(© CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Bay City News contributed to this report.)
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