The House Judiciary Committee approved Rep. Ken Calvert’s (R-Calif.) proposed bill, the Legal Workforce Act, on Thursday in a 22-9 vote.
The proposed legislation would require all U.S. employers to check the work eligibility of all future hires through the E-Verify system. Calvert drafted the language with his colleagues in the House, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)
“Americans have made it clear that any effort to reform our broken immigration system must include mandatory employment verification,” Calvert said. “When I led the effort in 1996 to establish E-Verify, I did so because we had to develop a tool that allowed employers to determine whether or not workers they hired were legally authorized to work in our country.”
The E-Verify system was created in 1996 via legislation introduced by Calvert. It is a web-based program that checks the Social Security numbers or alien identification numbers of new hires against Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security records in order to cut out fraudulent numbers and make sure that new hires are eligible to work in the United States.
Calvert said that American jobs are the primary draw for most immigrants and the United States must implement laws that ensure that only immigrants who have come to the United States through the proper legal process are given work.