The new criticism of E-Verify is that too many illegal immigrants get through it. Yes, some significant share of people, at least those with really good fake identity the ones that acquire a whole stolen identity with their name and a unique social security number, those get through. But first of all that still weeds out the casual illegal worker, it is still going to catch a significant portion.

Number two, former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan when she was the head of the commission on immigration reform back in the 90s, before E-Verify was even called that, proposed a set of reforms for the program. What they identified at that time was that sophisticated identity theft could make it through the system and there are two things you can do.

One, you can develop criteria that would raise red flags for multiple uses of the same social security number, name, and date of birth – the three things that E-Verify checks. If those things come up say twice in a year that is no big surprise. You might change jobs or you might have two jobs, but if it comes up seven or eight times in different states in a year that is a clear indication that that identity has been stolen.

The second thing they have to do is hook up with the DMVs [Department of Motor Vehicles] in every state so that when you type in the name, a person’s picture from their driver’s license shows up. If it is obviously not him then you know something is wrong. That has been tried before with passport photos in the system and they have immigration photos of them in the system. Some of the states