Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast

Daily Podcast. It is Monday, April 30th. I'm Anastasia Yuglova.

Last week Cato Scholar Jim Harper testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary

on proposals to improve the electronic employment verification system.

Different versions of the verification system are ubiquitous in immigration reform bills,

but Jim does not think that an improvement over the current system is possible.

Instead, he suggests aligning immigration law with the economic interests of Americans by increasing legal immigration.

I've got a few questions for Jim.

Some version of the electronic employment verification system can be found in every immigration

proposal that I've looked at.

But what exactly is it?

Under current law, every employer has to fill out an I-9 form that basically collects identity, information, and Social Security number to verify that a person is in the United States legally can work legally in the United States. Electronic employment verification is the idea

that this process should be automated and use the internet to verify more carefully who a person

is. By submitting this information to the government you can determine

whether a name and Social Security number pair are together in government databases. You can

do logic checks to see whether that same pair has been used several times in succession,

perhaps in different states, and determine whether someone has submitted fraudulent documents.

So the idea is to strengthen internal enforcement of immigration law.

The logic of it, of course, is that the U.S. is an economic magnet.

The reason why there is illegal immigration is because of the jobs that are available here,

and that's what brings them here.

So if you were to

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