“Basic Pilot” Employment Eligibility Verification Program Expanded Nationwide

IMMIGRANTS & EMPLOYMENT

IRCA Employment Verification and
Antidiscrimination Protections

(More up-to-date information on the Basic Pilot is available here.)

“Basic Pilot” employment eligibility verification program expanded nationwide
Immigrants' Rights Update, Vol. 18, No. 8, December 22, 2004

As of Dec. 1, 2004, the automated employment eligibility verification program known as the Basic Pilot has been expanded to allow employers in all 50 states to access its system. This change is a result of the Basic Pilot Program Extension and Expansion Act, which was enacted on Dec. 3, 2003.

In addition to providing that the Basic Pilot program be expanded to all states, the 2003 act also required the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) to submit a report by June 2004 to the Committees on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. This report should have evaluated whether the problems identified by the independent evaluation of the Basic Pilot had been substantially resolved, and it should have outlined what steps the DHS was taking to resolve any outstanding problems before undertaking the expansion of the Basic Pilot program to all 50 states.

While the DHS did submit a report to Congress, it failed to adequately address the concerns laid out in the independent evaluation conducted by Temple University and Westat, which was published in January 2002 (a copy of the report can be found here). Most importantly, the evaluation explicitly recommends against expanding the Basic Pilot program into a large-scale national program until the DHS and the Social Security Administration (SSA) address the inaccuracies in their databases that prevent those agencies from confirming the work authorization of many workers. (For more on this, see “Evaluation of Eligibility Verification Basic Pilot Raises Concerns,” Immigrants’ Rights Update, July 15, 2003, p. 11.)

The Basic Pilot was created, along with two other pilot programs, under section 401(b) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). The two other programs—the Citizenship Attestation Pilot and the Machine-Readable Document Pilot—were suspended in 2003. Under the IIRIRA, the Basic Pilot was to operate in the states of California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas. In 1999, it was extended to cover employers in Nebraska.

According to information provided by the DHS at a meeting with immigrants’ rights advocates on Sept. 9, 2004, currently 4,200 employers voluntarily use the Basic Pilot employment eligibility verification system. Though many of these employers are headquartered in one of the six states in which the Basic Pilot was available before Dec. 1, they have multiple sites at which they employ workers, so that approximately 15,000 work sites use the Basic Pilot system. With the expansion to all 50 states, the DHS estimates an increase of approximately 25 percent in the number of employers that will voluntarily sign up for the Basic Pilot program. This will also increase the number of immigrant workers who will face difficulties becoming employed because of the inaccuracies in the government databases and delays in entering information regarding new immigrants.

More information on how the Basic Pilot program operates is available from a “Basic Information Brief: DHS Basic Pilot Program,” available at www.nilc.org/immsemplymnt/ircaempverif/index.htm#adv_rsrcs. For assistance with specific cases where workers are being adversely affected as a result of the Basic Pilot, contact Marielena Hincapié at hincapie@nilc.org.