Another day, another debunking.

DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker has another effort to debunk information about the E-Verify program on DHS’ Leadership Journal blog. In this case, it’s “Debunking the ‘E-Verify Capacity Problem.’”

Critics say that only 60 thousand employers are registered with E-Verify, while there are 6 million employers in the U.S. But this is an example of using an accurate statistic to produce a misleading result. Many of those 6 million employers won’t hire a single worker this year. Others will hire thousands. What counts is how many individual hires the system can handle… . Based on a recent load testing, the system has the capacity to handle 240 million queries a year. That’s three to four times the number of people who are usually hired in a given year.

Fair enough, and frankly I hadn’t been aware of there being an argument about a “capacity” problem with E-Verify’s servers or data systems.

Running a Web search on “E-Verify capacity” to see what the capacity argument is, I found little other than a Government Accountability Office report which says the following:

A mandatory E-Verify program would necessitate an increased capacity at both U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and SSA to accommodate the estimated 7.4 million employers in the United States… . Although DHS has not prepared official cost figures, USCIS officials estimated that a mandatory E-Verify program could cost a total of about $765 million for fiscal years 2009 through 2012 if only newly hired employees are queried through the program and about $838 million over the same 4-year period if both newly hired and current employees are queried… . . SSA has estimated that implementation of a mandatory E-Verify program would cost a total of about $281 million and require hiring 700 new employees for a total of 2,325 additional workyears for fiscal years 2009 through 2013.

That’s a very different kind of capacity - and very expensive. I have written here before about a Social Security Administration workers’ union official who pointed out the lacking capacity at SSA to handle national E-Verify.

The difference in these kinds of capacity reveals an inference in my and others’ criticism of E-Verify that Baker and the folks at DHS may be missing. I may have been too obscure again yesterday when I wrote, “Just because you have a glass coffee table, that doesn’t mean you can build a glass sundeck.”

The class of businesses currently using E-Verify is particularly proactive about not hiring illegal immigrants – either because they are naturally fastidious or because they have been subject to enforcement actions that practically or legally require it. They may self-select against hiring potential illegal immigrants – perhaps avoiding native or fluent Spanish speakers, for example. If their motivation is avoiding trouble with the feds, these employers may not tell workers about tentative nonconfirmations, getting rid of them under other pretenses. Or they may prescreen workers using E-Verify before even hiring them. (Sure, E-Verify fan, tell yourself it’s against the rules - like driving over the speed limit is against the rules.) This all makes it look to folks like Stewart Baker like they’re catching illegal workers.

For what they’re worth, these employers are the low-hanging fruit for the E-Verify program. This is the best E-Verify will get. The rest of the nation’s employers, and the workers they hire, will produce higher error rates and new, more difficult problems.

The capacity of E-Verify’s databases and servers may be fine. The capacity of the various federal agencies to sort out the results of national E-Verify – not so good.