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With many in the nation watching, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act" ("SB 1070") into law. The legislation represents Arizona's latest effort to combat illegal immigration and is now the centerpiece of a national political firestorm, including criticism from President Obama and numerous public interest groups. In addition, SB 1070 already is the subject of two federal lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. Lost among this debate, however, are those provisions of the law directed toward Arizona employers. To learn more about the law and its implications for employers, please continue reading Littler's ASAP What Arizona's Controversial Immigration Law Means for Employers by Neil M. Alexander and Michael J. Lehet.

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A 26-page outline of a new proposed immigration overhaul bill would require all employers to use a newly-created Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information, and Electronic Verification of Employment (BELIEVE) System as a means of verifying employee work authorization. Within 18 months of the proposed bill’s enactment, the Social Security Administration would be required to issue biometric social security cards, which within five years would serve as the only acceptable document employers could use for employment verification purposes. The proposal also calls for a 300 percent increase in monetary fines against employers that knowingly hire illegal workers, and enhanced civil and criminal penalties against employers that engage in egregious labor violations involving unauthorized workers. To learn more about the proposal and the potential implications for employers, please continue reading at Littler's D.C. Employment Law Update blog.

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The federal government has told a Maryland judge that it plans to delay for the fourth time the effective date of a rule requiring certain federal contractors and subcontractors to use the E-Verify program.  Continue reading about this development on Littler's Washington DC Employment Law Update blog.

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As reported in The Los Angeles Times, the E-Verify program recently received a few boosts, with the Obama administration announcing that it wants Congress to allocate an additional $12 million to the program in the next fiscal year (bringing its budget to $112 million) and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stating in a congressional hearing that E-Verify was "a cornerstone of workplace enforcement across the country." Almost 125,000 businesses are signed up for the E-Verify program. Some argue, though, that E-Verify will not solve the issue of illegal immigration and that expansion of the program would only push more undocumented workers underground. Others generally support E-Verify but criticize the program’s accuracy rate. The government reports that E-Verify has a 96% accuracy rate, and Napolitano has stated that the government plans to improve the accuracy of the databases.

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Representatives Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and Sam Johnson (R-TX) have introduced a bill that would establish a mandatory electronic verification system to take the place of E-Verify. As reported at Workforce.com, Giffords and Johnson hope their bill, the New Employee Verification Act, will either be the foundation for employment verification in a broader immigration bill or move through Congress on its own.

The proposed legislation would:

• Require all employers to use either the Electronic Employment Verification System (based on the new-hire system used to enforce child support payments) or the Secure Electronic Employment Verification System (which would authenticate an employee’s identity using biometric information). Data for recently hired employees would be checked against Social Security and Department of Homeland Security databases to determine work eligibility.
• Eliminate the I-9 immigration form.
• Establish civil and criminal penalties for employers that knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
• Establish federal preemption of state laws on employment verification.
• Require that the Social Security database, which has a 4.1% error rate, be cleaned up before the new system takes effect.

Giffords and Johnson have collaborated on the legislation with The HR Initiative for a Legal Workforce, which is led by the Society for Human Resource Management.

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