E-Verify checks workers' status quickly

WASHINGTON, June 24 (UPI) -- With a few mouse clicks, an employer can tell whether an immigrant is eligible to work in the United States legally, government officials say.

And more and more employers are turning to E-Verify, the Web-based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, USA Today reports.

Each week, an average of more than 1,000 employers sign up, and companies make nearly 200,000 employment checks, the newspaper said.

Already this year, employers have used E-Verify to check the status of 5.5 million workers, compared with 6.6 million in all of 2008, USA Today said.

Homeland Security has found that 3.5 percent of the immigrants whose names are run through the system are not authorized to work in the United States, William Wright, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, told the newspaper.

One immigrant advocacy group, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, said it is concerned that more than 3 million legal immigrants could be mistakenly denied work because of an E-Verify error.