This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 6th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

The relationship between employer and employee already suffers from plenty of intrusion by government, but one more might be on the fast track,

electronic employment eligibility verification.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute calls it Franz Kafka's

Solution to Illegal Immigration.

What's the drive behind creating these electronic employment eligibility verification systems?

Well with the failure of immigration reform last summer, obviously politicians particularly at the federal level are looking around for

something to do on immigration and in an election year they feel pressured to

do something on immigration. In the meantime we've seen over the course of now 20 plus years that the policy of internal

enforcement has not succeeded.

Programs in Washington, D.C. never die, they just get bigger.

And so the push is on to strengthen internal enforcement, the Form I-9 process that we're

also familiar with these documents you have to fill out when you start new employment and make it into an electronic

system where data is submitted to the government for its review at the time of hiring or

perhaps prior to hiring people for new jobs.

What evidence is there from state systems?

Well, there's been very little usage of the basic pilot system,

recently renamed to eVerify. So far, a small infinitesimal percentage of American employers

have been using a basic pilot for years. Recently under federal pressure, that number has increased to where about 52,000 or 0.88% of all

employers in the country.

The state of Arizona, beginning January 1st, requires its employers to use eVerify.

But as yet, because January is a relatively slow hiring month,

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