o'amnesty - NPR E-Verify Whoppers! (NumbersUSA.com)

From:  Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA.com Date: Tuesday 7JUN2011
NPR's 2 FALSEHOODS ON E-VERIFY ERROR RATES THAT YOU CAN CORRECT WHEREVER YOU HEAR THEM IN THE FUTURE
      We have a blog on our website that deals with huge whoppers of falsehoods that National Public Radio recently promulgated against E-Verify.
     With two Supreme Court rulings in three weeks backing the expansion of E-Verify to drive illegal aliens out of U.S. jobs, the multi-milion-dollar pro-illegal-worker propaganda industry is in full force.
     We need you to challenge falsehoods about E-Verify wherever you find them -- with comments on blogs and on-line news items, with phone-ins to radio shows, with letters to the editor in newspapers and with in-person corrections with friends and colleagues.
     And please forward this email widely via email, Facebook and Twitter.
     We're picking on NPR because it has been getting worse and worse in its coverage of immigration issues. The story in question was about the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Arizona's law requiring all employers to use E-Verify.
Falsehood #1
     The correspondent inexplicably said, "Now, E-verify is a sort of a pilot computer-data-check system that Congress specifically made voluntary because about one out of five workers is erroneously reported as illegal because of mistaken name spellings, similar names, things like that."
     Congress did not make E-Verify voluntary because of an error rate.  E-Verify was originally made voluntary because it was a pilot program.  It has remained mostly voluntary against the wishes of American voters because the cheap labor lobby had been incredibly successful at keeping it that way until several states stepped up to the plate . But this is a small mistake compared to the "one out of five" whopper.
Falsehood #2
See quote above about the one-in-five error rate.
     The NPR correspondent's approximation of an error rate for E-Verify of 20% isn't even close to the truth.
     The percentage of authorized workers run through E-Verify who receive tentative non-confirmations is 0.3 percent (three-tenths of one percent), and has been for at least two and a half years.
     Statistics from Fiscal Year 2010, however, indicate that of the 15,640,167 E-Verify cases submitted:

• 98.3% were automatically confirmed as work authorized,
  
• 0.3% were confirmed as work authorized after contesting and resolving an initial nonconfirmationan avenue available to all workers
  
• 1.43% were not found work authorized (these would be illegal aliens or legal foreign visitors without a work permit -- the very people E-Verify is designed to keep out of U.S. jobs)
       So, to make sure you understand, the so-called error rate is 0.3% which means that less than half of one percent of the people run through the system get a notice that they are not yet approved to work even though it turns out they do have the right to work.
       Next, be clear that this 0.3% don't lose their job.  Rather, they continue on their job while checking with federal authorities to find out why they are not being confirmed and getting their records straight.  The fact that 0.3% of the queries produce an "error" doesn't mean that anybody who has the legal right to a job doesn't get to keep the job.
       NPR did not have to read the Court's decision to get their facts straight.  All they had to do was go to the USCIS website, where the most recent statistics are presented in a colorful pie chart.  We don't know which source led NPR so astray, but somewhere, someone is getting high fives for pulling one over on the news team of "All Things Considered."

     We hope to see a national mandatory E-Verify bill start moving through the House any week now.
     The supporters of illegal immigration are nearly hysterical about this and are unleashing an incredible misinformation effort.  And their main trick seems to be to lie about error rates in E-Verify.
     They have been so successful in their lies about error rates that we've even seen some people and organizations that generally have been opposed to illegal immigration repeating the falsehoods.
     Read the full blog and join the discussion by clicking here.
THANKS, Roy Beck, NumbersUSA.com

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