This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 20, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One solution regularly offered to curb illegal immigration is the federal government's

e-Verify system. a T-partiers are beginning

to realize just what an encroachment on freedom the program represents.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute offers his thoughts.

Conservatives often point to illegal immigration as a problem.

As a solution, they typically offer making employers responsible for

determining whether or not certain workers are legal. That's right. In the 1986 immigration reform actually we started down this path

with the creation of a new system whereby employers would have to

check the paperwork of people they were newly hiring, the I-9 forms that people

fill out that employers are pretty well used to at this point.

That didn't have much effect on illegal immigration.

And so a program called Basic Pilot got its start in 1996 a decade later.

The idea behind Basic Pilot was that some employers would call the

Federal Government and check and see if the documentation worked out, if it fit with the

information in government databases. A few years ago under the Bush administration,

Basic Pilot was renamed E-Verify and it's been moved to an online system where employers who

are in the program submit new employees information to the Social

Security Administration and to DHS in the case of immigrants to see if the information that they've given matches up with what's

in the database.

This has been treated as the sort of one-stop solution for illegal immigration.

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