Avoid Penalties by Using E-Verify

The Arizona employer-sanctions law requires employers to use the free online federal system to check the legal status of all new employees, or risk losing their business licenses if they employ an illegal worker. "All businesses, to protect themselves against being charged with a violation of the law, should utilize E-Verify to determine the immigration status of their employees," said Leesa Berens Morrison, a special assistant in the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.

Despite an Arizona state law requiring businesses to verify that all new employees are legal workers, only about half of new hires in Arizona have been vetted by a federal system that checks their status. About a third of the state's estimated 100,000 employers have signed up for the E-Verify program. Federal employment data and figures from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services suggest hundreds of thousands of workers have been hired without being checked against federal records.

During E-Verify's most recent full fiscal year, which ended in September 2009, Arizona employers made more than 1.3 million new hires but ran just 730,000 E-Verify checks. Despite the bleak economy, employers have continued to add workers in the state, making nearly 915,000 hires during the first nine months of 2009, according to data from U.S. immigration officials and labor data on the U.S. Census Bureau website. The E-Verify scofflaws likely are small businesses. Lawmakers who backed the Legal Arizona Workers Act hoped to reduce the number of undocumented workers who come to Arizona. The state has an estimated 460,000 now, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Penalizing businesses that hire them was part of the strategy. Without the chance to hold a job, migrants' incentive to live here drops, with the likelihood growing that they will leave the state. The law allows county attorneys to file civil lawsuits against employers who knowingly or intentionally hire illegal workers.