HB56—the anti-immigration law signed by Alabama Governor Robert Bentley in June—has been in the spotlight for being the strictest immigration law bill passed in the United States, second only to Arizona’s SB 1070. Among the law’s notable aspects is the obligation that schools check students and parents’ immigration status and report back to the state legislature.

Section 28 of the bill indicates that “Every public elementary and secondary school in this state, at the time of enrollment in kindergarten or any grade in such school, shall determine whether the student enrolling in public school was born outside the jurisdiction of the United States or is the child of an alien not lawfully present in the United States…” Once the information is compiled, each school district will have to submit a report to the State Board of Education, which will transmit the information to the Legislature.
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Arizona, Georgia and Alabama, among other states, are enacting laws that require employers to verify the legal status of current and potential employees. But the tool to be used, the Employment Eligibility Verification Program (EEVP) or E-Verify, a nationwide system to verify that hired employees can work legally in the U.S. has consistently been called into question. The system—Internet-based and free—is currently used by 180,000 employers over 675,000 work sites.

The origin of the EEVP date back to 1996 when the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) was signed under the Bill Clinton presidency. Besides the employer, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Association (SSA) are involved in the process of confirming the legality of the workforce hired in the U.S. Although recent bill proposals—like the Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 2164)—present E-Verify as the panacea and extend its scope of action, it is being questioned due to its frequent failures. As President Obama said last week when he made reference to a necessary comprehensive immigration reform, “we don’t want to expose employers to the risk where they end up rejecting a qualified candidate for a job because the list says that that person is an illegal immigrant, and it turns out that the person isn’t an illegal immigrant.”

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