Lookout Services has set up a Web site, thelookoutmonitor.com, that uses reports of raids on businesses that hire illegal workers to illustrate the need for I-9 compliance via E-Verify. The site also keeps track of various state and local regulations regarding employment laws.

This streamlined method that allows employers to use E-Verify to check supplied Social Security information or other documents with government information seems like a step in the right direction for immigration policy. However, there’s a large coalition of business, labor, and civil rights groups who are fighting to stop mandatory E-Verify participation.

Angelo Amador, director of immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has big problems with making E-Verify a mandatory process.

“The program has a bad reputation, and they are trying to change its name,” Amador says. “Independent studies, GAO reports, everybody that looks at it says it has design flaws, that it gives false negatives.”

Amador argues that E-Verify is a flawed program that unjustly forces employers to police immigration law and leaves businesses open to prosecution and lawsuits.

“The big problem we have is that it doesn’t give you a final answer—it doesn’t tell you to fire or give an individual a job. It gives a ‘tentative nonconfirmation,’” he says.

Tentative nonconfirmation is a sort of verification limbo that results when prospective employees’ identification is not verified by E-Verify. A December 2006 report to the Department of Homeland Security cited tentative nonconfirmation of legal workers as a flaw in the system.

However, the report also found that from 2004 to 2006, the system approved 85 percent of the employees run through the system for work.

This situation creates what Amador calls a Catch-22: employers risk discrimination lawsuits for rejecting eligible workers, or they risk investigation by the government for hiring illegal workers.

Tyler Moran, employment policy director for the National Immigration Law Center, also disagrees with mandatory E-Verify participation.

Some employers want to do the right thing and want to follow rules, she says, but they don’t understand what they need to do. Less savory employers will use the system to check out a prospective employee’s legal status without also offering them a job. If they find a problem with the employee’s documents, those employers won’t tell the workers, she adds.

Moran contends that the electronic system puts a burden on companies that want to follow the law and allows bad actors to stay out of the system. “With the I-9 process, if I am a worker, I fill out a form and the employer verifies it. With E-Verify, the federal government has to say yes or no to a person being employed,” Moran says.

As the government attempts to quiet the promise of jobs that fuel illegal immigration, it is clear that new technology designed to improve immigration enforcement is both imperfect and unwanted by certain labor groups as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. One thing is for sure: As E-Verify and other immigration crackdown measures are implemented, restaurant owners and operators will start thinking seriously about getting their paperwork, digital or otherwise, in order.