This is the Kator Daily podcast for Monday, February 6,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown.

EVerify is supposed to keep illegal immigrants from working in the U.S.

The program doesn't do a very good job of keeping ineligible workers

from earning money, and it occasionally ensnares Native-born Americans.

That's to say nothing of the fact that we don't know how this federal permission slip to work will be used to punish disfavored people or groups in the future.

None of that has stopped Florida, Governor Ron Desantis, who has already punished some businesses that have refused to use it.

Cato's David Beer explains.

What do we know, broadly speaking, about the functioning, the purpose, the efficacy of the federal intervention known as E-Verify.

E-Verify is an employment verification system that employers can use voluntarily at a federal level

unless they're a federal contractor in order to validate certain information provided by employers, by employees or

prospective employees such as their Social Security number and their name

that those names and those Social Security numbers match information that's

held by the Social Security Administration or by the Department of Homeland Security if they have an employment authorization document supplied by that agency.

It works pretty well if you're a legal worker.

You know, it has an error rate of just 0.2%. So that seems like you're pretty unlikely to get caught up in the system if you're

authorized to work. The problem is if you're running millions of people

through this system every year, then you are going to end up with tens of

thousands of people be caught up in that error rate.

And that's what we've seen happen, is that even though the error rate

is really small in percentage terms, the fact that it's being applied to tens of millions of

hires every year something close to 40 million queries on an annual basis, then you're going to end up with,

...