Legal Developments In Employment Authorization Verification Measures: What Employers Need To Know

Soon after the Obama Administration put the new head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in place, the agency had to deal with two draft regulations that had been put on the back burner for some time. The first—the so-called social security no-match regulation— was nixed by the DHS without much elaboration. The no-match regulation, introduced by DHS through its police arm, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), proposed to hold employers liable for constructive knowledge of hiring unlawful workers who were the subject of no-match letters from the Social Security Administration, if the employers did not clear-up or terminate such employees within a prescribed period. The SSA regularly mails out these no-match letters to employers on behalf of certain employees whose social security numbers do not match their names on the SSA database. Opponents of the no-match regulation argued that the social security numbers bear little correlation to immigration status,