The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is delaying the Bush administration plan to require federal contractors to use the E-Verify worker background check system.

Criticizing the move, Lamar Smith (R-TX), ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee, says, “It is ironic that at the same time President Obama was pushing for passage of the stimulus package to help the unemployed, his administration delayed implementation of a rule designed to protect jobs for U.S. citizens and legal workers.”

E-Verify may well have been designed or intended to protect jobs for citizens and legal workers, but that’s not at all what it would do. I wrote about it in a Cato Policy Analysis titled “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration” (a 10-year follow-on to Stephen Moore’s “A National Id System: Big Brother’s Solution to Illegal Immigration”):

A mandatory national EEV system would have substantial costs yet still fail to prevent illegal immigration. It would deny a sizable percentage of law-abiding American citizens the ability to work legally. Deemed ineligible by a database, millions each year would go pleading to the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration for the right to work.

Even if E-Verify were workable, mission creep would lead to its use for direct federal control over many aspects of American citizens’ lives. Though it should be scrapped, the longer E-Verify is delayed, the better.