Few employers are taking advantage of a little-known federal program that allows them to weed out workers who seek jobs using fake documents.

It’s intended to fix one of the biggest problems in trying to crack down on illegal immigration, the use of counterfeit documents by illicit foreign labor.

The eight-year-old program allows employers to verify workers’ employment eligibility by logging onto a government Web site and checking their documents against Social Security and immigration databases.

“I have an answer back within a minute,” said Martin Thompson, vice president for human resources at Bar-S Foods Co., a Phoenix-based meat-processing company that has taken part in the program since 1998.

Nationally, just 4,385 employers are participating, said Chris Bentley, spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees the program.

That is just a fraction of the 5.7 million companies counted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2002, the most recent data available.

Few Know Of Program In Arizona

In Arizona, 101 employers have enrolled of 96,000 companies counted by the census.

“I’m not sure most employers even know about this program,” said Farrell Quinlan, spokesman for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Most employers would be relieved to have a system that allowed them to easily verify a worker’s eligibility, Mr. Quinlan said.

He said the current system places employers in a Catch-22 between unwittingly hiring illegal immigrants using fake documents and opening themselves to discrimination charges by turning away immigrant workers whom they suspect are using fake documents.

“Until there is better understanding of what is effective and what is available, participation will remain below what one might want,” Mr. Quinlan said.

Congress created the program in 1997, rolling it out first in California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and New York, states with the highest numbers of undocumented immigrants, Mr. Bentley said.

Not mandatory in 1999, Congress expanded the program to Nebraska at the request of the state’s meatpacking industry. It was expanded to all 50 states in December.

Participating in the program puts employers at a competitive disadvantage with companies that continue to hire illegal immigrants, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a research group that favors tighter limits on immigration.

Unless it’s mandatory, participation will remain low, he said.

Congress, however, has avoided making the program mandatory under pressure from business interests, he said. —

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