This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 18th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

He verifies a pilot program aimed at making sure that people who are employed in the US are legally able to do so.

According to Cato Institute Director of Information Policy Studies, Jim Harper,

he verify fits perfectly the definition of programs that president-elect Obama

is pledged to eliminate.

It's expensive, wasteful, and does nothing to promote its own ends while imposing

significant costs on the private sector and on the privacy of workers.

There's a program that's perhaps trying to move from pilot status to national status right now called eVerify, which is an attempt to create

a viable system of internal enforcement for immigration law.

The theory of eVerify is if you make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants, employers won't hire them,

and that will reduce the economic magnet that exists within the country.

Now, we've been working on versions of this for 20 years now,

and it hasn't succeeded yet.

And Congressional Republicans,

the Department of Homeland Security,

and the Bush administration, essentially late in President Bush's second term,

tried to sort of double down on the failed policy of internal enforcement by ramping up,

eVerify.

EVerify works by collecting information about new hires.

Most people are familiar with the form I-9.

You fill out when you start a new job.

...