The senior U.S. senator from New York – and third-ranking Democrat in the Senate – indicated last week that he would like to scrap the controversial E-Verify system for checking employment eligibility, and replace it with something else:

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, faulted the government system, known as E-Verify, for not being able to detect identity fraud. “E-Verify is both unfair and ineffective,” Schumer told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday, June 25, prior to participating in a White House meeting on immigration with President Barack Obama.

Schumer said that E-Verify, which compares information from I-9 forms against Social Security and Department of Homeland Security databases, is unfair because it singles out people with Hispanic surnames. It is ineffective because illegal workers can slip through the system by stealing Social Security numbers and making fake IDs. “You need a biometric,” Schumer said. “You need a picture. You need it to be unforgeable.”

Read the rest at Workforce Management magazine (www.workforce.com).