The Hill News

Last week, President Obama gave yet another job creation speech that was aimed at protecting one jobâ€"his own.  Two months after President Obama took office, the number of unemployed Americans eclipsed 13 million for the first time in history.  Now, two years after he took office, nearly 14 million Americans are unemployed and another nine million can’t find full-time work.  President Obama has a right to be concerned about his job.

But if President Obama is indeed focused on putting 23 million unemployed or underemployed Americans back to work, there is one element that is missing from his jobs plan: a federal E-Verify requirement.   This is one of the best options available to put unemployed Americans back to work.

E-Verify is a web-based program that quickly identifies individuals working illegally in the United States and protects jobs for legal workers by checking the Social Security numbers of new hires. We could open up millions of jobs fo! r unemployed Americans by requiring all U.S. employers to use E-Verify. 

The “E” in E-Verify could just as well stand for “easy” and “effective.”  It takes only one to two minutes to use per new hire and immediately confirms 99.5 percent of work-eligible employees.  Even though E-Verify is not mandatory, many businesses voluntarily use the program.  Nearly 290,000 American employers use E-Verify and an average of 1,300 new businesses sign up each week. 

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