H.R. 4088, the misnamed "SAVE" Act
Proposed by Representatives Shuler (D-NC) and Tancredo (R-CO), H.R. 4088, misleadingly dubbed the "SAVE" Act, is a bill of immigration enforcement measures that includes a particularly ill-conceived expansion of the electronic employment verification system known as Basic Pilot or E-Verify (PDF).
H.R.4088's expansion of E-Verify would require all U.S. employers to check employees' work authorization in the electronic databases of the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The SSA has estimated that if Basic Pilot/E-Verify were to become mandatory, errors in the SSA database could result in 2.5 million citizens and legal immigrants being misidentified as unauthorized to work in the United States each year.
People of color and especially Latino/as stand to be particularly hard hit by misidentification, as there are no safeguards to prevent employers from practicing racial profiling and checking potential employees in the database before hiring, although it is technically against regulations. According to a 2007 independent evaluation of E-Verify commissioned by DHS, 47% of employers currently using E-Verify (about 1% of all employers in the U.S.) have violated the rules and pre-screened employees. This could result in job-seekers being turned down for jobs due to a database mistake which they may never know exists.
Furthermore, when an employer sees that a current employee is unauthorized in the database—which may be due to one of the 2.5 million errors present—there is no safeguard to prevent the employer from simply firing the employee instead of giving him or her a chance to rectify the error. With DHS proposing increasingly strict regulations that punish employers for hiring unauthorized workers, it is more and more likely that employers will simply bypass or lay off workers who employers perceive as having or being likely to have documentation problems.
Not only does H.R.4088 propose an extremely flawed and potentially damaging electronic employment verification system, it also fails to offer a comprehensive solution for the 12 million undocumented immigrants who are already in the United States. Instead, H.R.4088 carries the usual proposals of increased fencing, boats, helicopters, and border patrol agents which we know to be ineffective.
In sum, the "SAVE" Act threatens to put thousands of workers—many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet—at greater risk for job loss. Its enforcement-only tactics will drive undocumented who are here further into the shadows, endangering citizens and non citizens alike.
To urge your Representative to oppose the SAVE Act, send an email to your Representative through our online Action Campaign.
To learn more about H.R.4088, check out:
- "SAVED": The SAVE Act, Nativism, and Our Role as Immigration Reform Advocates of Faith, a blog post written by a staff member of the UUA Washington Office for Advocacy.
- An analysis of the Employment Eligibility Verification System proposed in H.R. 4088 (PDF) written by the National Immigration Law Center.
- Check the Library of Congress's online records to see if your Representative is a co-sponsor.
Last updated on Wednesday, April 23, 2008.
