I urge ALL of you American players to take some time and do a little research, write a letter to congress or take other steps to bring this topic to the public eye.
This Program Would:
Force ALL employers in America to seek government permission BEFORE hiring ANY worker, American or Foreign.
Cost Americans 11.7 Billion each year, most of which will be placed on employers.
Would force all private employers to submit Social Secruity Numbers and additional information on prospective and current employees to the Department of Homeland Secruity to run through a computer database.
The Database will contain extensive personal information on EVERY American...This could be stolen, misused or transformed into a National ID system.
If the program is made Mandatory for all employers, and the 10 percent error rate that already has been experienced continues, hundreds of thousdands of Americans would be improperly denied the ability to work.
Requiring Federal Government permission before taking a job has the potential to finacially ruin thousands of law-abiding, taxpaying citizens.
Here is a brief letter from the Liberty Coalition:
Dear Liberty Coalition members,
Section 301 of Senator Specter's Chairman's Mark on Immigration, the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006," proposes the creation of a nationwide pre-employment screening system for all Americans. This system has already passed the House of Representatives as part of Congressman Sensenbrenner's H.R. 4437, the "Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005."
Liberty Coalition urges its members to call or email the Senate Judciary Committee and your Senators to oppose the creation of an Employment Eligibility Verification System, or, if you cannot oppose this outright, to demand that rigorous privacy safeguards be built into any system through explicit, extensive, statutory language. The Committee is holding markups all day Wednesday, March 8, and Thursday, March 9, so immediate action is needed for maximum impact.
You can find your Senator by calling the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and asking for your Senator's office. The Senate Judiciary Committee phone number is 202-224-5225. You can email your state's Senators and the entire Judiciary Committee by visiting our automated action alert page set up for this issue.
Background Information:
* The GAO estimated in August 2005 that it will cost $11.7 billion annually to operate such a system, with the majority of the costs imposed on employers
* The existing Basic Pilot Employment Verification System created in 1996 only includes 3,600 employers; expanding it to all 8.4 million employers in the United States would face huge technological obstacles.
* In its current limited usage, the automated system fails to verify one in every ten workers. Multiply that failure rate by all 146 million employees and 54 million new hires every year, and hundreds of thousands of workers could lose their jobs or be needlessly denied work every year.
* Current legislative language does not require a system be put in place for Americans who are erroneously denied the right to work to seek redress and correct the information in their files.
* Identity theft and the use of fraudulent documents will increase dramatically as people exploit this weakness to circumvent the system.
* The collection of extensive sensitive information on every work-eligible American is a huge privacy risk, for both identity theft and misuse of data by government agencies or private entities contracted to operate the system.
* An additional amendment proposed by Senator Sessions that would allow all of the information in this system to be shared freely between the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor, and the Department of the Treasury shows how this system could be expanded to threaten personal privacy. While the stated purpose would be to identify illegal immigrants, the result could easily be government fishing expeditions into the private affairs of innocent Americans.
The no-fly list already in use has already proven to be flawed and many innocent Americans are denied the right to fly and forced to jump through unnessecary hoops to clear their name...This is not the American way of Innocent before proven guilty and pre-defined lists like this do little to help or to protect the the 'average' American.
Furthermore, the proposal will put more strain on small businesses already suffering from the inability to compete with large corporate entities. Making businesses foot the bill for such a program is ridiculus. If businesses want this kind of information, they can opt to do so using one of the many MANY pre-screening companies already in existence.
Whether you agree with the idea of a national database or not, this program needs to be scrutinized more closely...Unfortunatly, its being pushed through as a 'quick' fix to immigration problems and many people don't seem to grasp what it really is.
http://libertycoalition.net/ssn-dhs-pre-employ-alert