This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 9th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Under a plan floated in Congress and supported by the Trump administration the controversial and flawed e-Verify system

would become mandatory nationwide. It's aimed at preventing illegal immigrants from working,

but could instead put millions of Americans out of work.

David Beer explains.

Where have we been so far with EVerify?

What do we know about it?

So EVerify right now is really the government's attempt to create a national identification

system for all U.S US residents.

So it really includes anybody who has any kind of legal status in the United States,

whether they be temporary workers or U.S. citizens.

And an employer uses the system in order to verify

whether the person has work authorization in the United States before hiring them.

And so you run every new hire through the eVerify system and it checks their social security number if they're a citizen

or their alien identification number if they're a non-citizen through the Department of Homeland Security or the Social Security

administration and if that number doesn't match the name provided then it will reject you in the system.

And then there's a process for removing that person

from their position if they're unauthorized to work.

So what error rates have we seen in the eVerify system even though it's not a national I mean it's purported to be a national

program but it hasn't been rolled out nationally.

Right so the way it works right now is employers can use this voluntarily instead of going through the typical I-9 process.

...