Employer verification supposed to catch illegals

Washington Times:

The immigration reform bill that the Senate is scheduled to resume debating next week would make it difficult for employers to claim they unknowingly hired illegal aliens, according to reform advocates.
A worker-verification provision in the bill would require employers to check workers' immigration status online. They would need to maintain paper and electronic versions of employees' residency documents and could be more heavily fined for hiring illegal aliens.
Current laws make prosecution of employers too difficult to be a realistic deterrent against hiring illegal aliens, critics of immigration policy say.
Documentation required by the proposal would help prosecutors gather the evidence that has eluded them.
"It would be challenging [under current law] to demonstrate after the fact that someone hired an illegal alien," said Kurt Bardella, spokesman for the Immigration Reform Caucus, a group of 105 members of Congress seeking to reform immigration laws.
Illegal aliens now can use fake Social Security cards or leave a job as soon as they suspect Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are investigating them.
Although Mr. Bardella agreed that employers should be liable for knowingly hiring illegal aliens, meeting the standard of proof for court cases is demanding.
A required check of workers' residency status would show whether they are illegal.
"If they still moved forward knowing that, I think it's safe to say that employer knowingly hired an illegal immigrant," he said.
So far, arrests and prosecution by ICE has focused only on aliens, say some immigration policy critics.
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I think the verification provision really gives the employer a safe harbor when hiring. The problem with the current law is that Social Security records are not permitted to be shared with ICE in following up on the thousands of people who are just making up numbers. Some Employers have hundreds of such employees, yet ICE can't get the records to check the employers who are submitting them. It is not clear why Congress will not require making the records available.