As two advocates on opposing sides of the controversial employer sanctions law sparred over its merits and repercussions in a Valley Citizens League forum last week, they focused on one of the law’s provisions: the Basic Pilot Program.
It’s a protection for a business, said Rep. John Kavanagh, R-8, a supporter of the law.
Not quite, said Jessica Pacheco, a former official of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a vocal critic of the law.
The Basic Pilot Program, or E-Verify, is an Internet-based system operated by the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services in partnership with the Social Security Administration.
It helps determine both employment eligibility of new hires and the validity of their Social Security numbers.
If a company used the Basic Pilot Program to verify an employee’s immigration status, Arizona’s law grants the company a “rebuttable presumption” against charges it hired an illegal immigrant. A “rebuttable presumption” is an assumption that will stand as fact unless someone comes forward to contest it and prove otherwise.
In this situation, it would be assumed that the business did not knowingly hire an illegal immigrant.
After Pacheco explained the E-Verify process and cautioned employers to be careful as there are specific federal laws governing discrimination, Kavanagh said E-Verify is “actually a protection for the business.”
“If the business runs the recently hired employee through the E-Verify system and the employee comes back as being eligible to work, should the employee later be found to be illegal, there is a presumption — if charges are brought against the business — that the business did not know it was an illegal immigrant employee,” Kavanagh said.
“It’s important to note that it is a ‘rebuttable presumption’ and so it’s not a presumption that the court or the prosecutor needs to accept,” Pacheco responded. “And so they can say, ‘You did that, but you should have known that that they weren’t legal because of X, Y, Z determining factors, and so even though you used E-Verify, that’s not going to help you in court.”
Kavanagh then said: “And that’s an extremely important thing to make a ‘rebuttable presumption,’ and not an absolute presumption because there are plenty of people who can go on the street and get names and Social Security numbers that match that would easily get through E-Verify.”
Pacheco replied: “And that’s the problem with using E-Verify — because we go back to fraudulent documentation. It doesn’t get us what we need. What we need is a different federal system that we can actually rely on. Unfortunately, E-Verify is not it.”
Between Kavanagh and Pacheco there were agreements on the broader points regarding, among others, the need for border enforcement, a guest-worker program, and some form of employer sanctions.
But they disagreed on the details of how those things should be handled and enforced, specifically on the sanctions. For more than an hour during the debate, the two, at times in response to questions from the audience, argued on the economic, political and social dimensions of employer sanctions, confirming in the process the complexity of the issue at hand.
They also discussed at length the cost of illegal immigration, with Kavanagh citing studies showing that it is costing the state a fortune, and Pacheco maintaining that for every such study, there are others that provide a different picture.