By Paul Nachman
10/18/2011
Alabama’s recently enacted HB56, the “Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act," contains a multitude of nation-saving features that, one hopes, will be a model for the next round of state laws designed to compensate for the federal government’s feckless-on-steroids approach to enforcing our immigration laws.
(The full text, consisting of nearly 15,000 words in 30 sections is available in easily-readable form here.)
The Immigration Reform Law Institute [IRLI, an offshoot of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform] was heavily involved in crafting HB56. IRLI summarized the contents of the bill after it was passed:
The ATCPA includes provisions which require E-Verify for all employers (Sections 9 & 15), end the deductibility of compensation paid to unauthorized aliens workers as a business tax expense (Section 16), and permit law enforcement officers to verify the immigration status of a person lawfully stopped for a violation of state or local law, when the officer has reasonable suspicion the person is unlawfully present in the U.S. HB 56 also prohibits sanctuary practices by state and local officials (Sections 5 & 6) and prohibits concealing, harboring, and transporting illegal aliens which is consistent with federal law 8 U.S.C. 1324 (Section 13). Both citizens and permanent legal immigrants will gain protections against discriminatory firing by employers who continue to employ unauthorized aliens.
After recent actions in an Alabama federal district court and in the 11th Circuit federal appeals court, some sections of the law are in force and some have been enjoined (while the effective date of many sections is still ahead). Jon Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies discusses the status of the law’s various parts here.
Today, I was persuing the bill’s text for a different purpose when I noticed Section 26, which I've condensed to this:
Section 26. (a)(1) The Alabama Department of Homeland Security [DHS] shall establish and maintain an E-Verify employer agent service for any employer in this state with 25 or fewer employees to use the E-Verify program to verify an employee’s employment eligibility on behalf of the employer. The Alabama DHS shall establish an E-Verify employer agent account with the United States DHS, shall enroll a participating employer in E-Verify on its behalf, and shall conform to all federal statutes and regulations governing E-Verify employer agents. The Alabama DHS shall not charge a fee to a participating business entity or employer for this service.
(2) The Alabama DHS E-Verify employer agent service shall be in place within 90 days after the effective date of this act. The service shall accommodate an employer who wishes to communicate with the Alabama DHS by internet, by electronic mail, by facsimile machine, by telephone, or in person, provided that such communication is consistent with federal statutes and regulations governing E-Verify employer agents.
This strikes me as terrific! When I testified before Montana’s legislature on behalf of an E-Verify bill early this year (the bill didn’t pass), one complaint of the opponents was of the inconvenience and annoyance in keeping current with updates in E-Verify if an employer using it makes only an occasional hire.
(Related complaint from some ranch families in the state’s sparsely populated eastern plains: What if we just want to hire the neighbor kid down the road, whom we've known since he was born?)
Having been forewarned of this complaint, I actually included in my testimony the possibility of the hiring employer using the services of an E-Verify Employer Agent. This was news to the complainers.
But I hadn’t thought of the possibility that a state, itself, might provide this service. And for free!
Learning about this feature in Alabama’s new law, I asked my friend and VDARE,com regular Hal Netkin, immigration-patriot extraordinaire and expert on all-things-E-Verify, for his reaction. He replied, enthusiastically, "Now nobody in Alabama will have any excuse for not using E-Verify!"
Hal, a retired electrical engineer and refugee from California’s illegal-alien-blitzed San Fernando Valley, has been an E-Verify Employer Agent for several years. His website is here. Based in Arizona, he has E-Verify clients in other states, too, and charges a nominal $10 to a participating employer for each authorization query.
If you're an employer who wants to (or has to) use E-Verify — but you want to farm out the related work — and you're not in Alabama, you can hire Hal, or you can find another agent by googling on "e verify employer agent." There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of entities selling the service.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.