CIRC Opposes Anti-Worker, Anti-Small Business E-Verify Bill

Denver - The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition strongly opposed SB-33, a bill that would have forced all Colorado businesses to implement a flawed employment verification system. SB 33 would have placed an expensive burden on employers and discouraged qualified immigrant workers. The bill was killed today in committee by a 3-2 vote.

SB-33 would have required employers to use a deeply flawed database that has already proven ineffective. Colorado's 2006 immigration enforcement laws, which included mandatory use of E-Verify for all state departments, cost $2.03 million and failed to identify a single undocumented worker.

"One of our El Comite de Longmont clients lost her job because of an error in the E-Verify data base," said Bob Norris, Board President, El Comite de Longmont "She worked for a cleaning company and was assigned to a Federal Facility. The US Custom Agent, Clayton Porter, said in a letter that he felt sure that she was entitled to work. However, there was no match in the computer and he could not help her. This is just one of many cases where one of our clients had their life damaged by errors in Federal data bases. These are hard working people, not statistics."

A new report from the Immigration Policy Center shows that rather than preventing unauthorized workers from gaining employment, E-Verify harms U.S. citizen and legal immigrant workers who will be ensnared by database errors and forces U.S. businesses to bear additional costs associated with the program. Small businesses - which employ approximately 50% of the U.S. workforce - would be disproportionately affected. At a time when the U.S. economy is still struggling to recover from recession and the national unemployment rate hovers around 10%, expanding E-Verify before improving it would be a costly and chaotic mistake.

The costs to Colorado taxpayers include enforcement of law; prosecution of businesses who do not comply with the law; litigation regarding workers who are wrongly fired or not-hired because of an incorrect E-Verify result, and business owners who challenge the revocation of their licenses for alleged non-compliance. All of these place another financial burden on small businesses that are less able to afford a costly new government mandate and discourages qualified workers from contributing to the economy.

"Real solutions to our broken immigration system must be tackled by our federal government, not by a mandate forced onto Colorado workers and small businesses by SB-33," said Hans Meyer, Political Coordinator for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. "We need a system that's fair to workers and employers alike, and this wasn't it."