Sponsors (45)
Official title: To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to make mandatory and permanent requirements relating to use of an electronic employment eligibility verification system, and for other purposes.
Introduced January 9, 2025 by Ken Calvert · Last progress January 9, 2025
The bill aims to tighten and modernize employment-eligibility verification—improving fraud prevention, faster confirmations, and clearer rules—while imposing new costs, privacy risks, stronger penalties, and potential employment disruptions that will fall heaviest on employers and vulnerable workers.
Employers and workers: the bill strengthens identity-matching and verification accuracy (photo checks, pilot testing of new technologies, system safeguards), reducing identity fraud and wrongful matches during hiring.
Employers and new hires: automated confirmation codes, faster verification timelines, and pilot evaluations can reduce onboarding delays and give employers clearer, quicker hiring outcomes.
Workers (including immigrants and children) get procedural protections—SSN suspension for victims of fraud, secondary verification processes, and temporary protections from termination during verification—reducing identity-theft harms and prolonged job uncertainty.
Small businesses and employers: the bill imposes substantial new administrative, training, and technology costs (photo matching, pilot tech deployment, recordkeeping, mandatory queries) that raise compliance burdens and operating expenses.
Immigrants and other workers: automated matches and tentative nonconfirmations can delay hiring or lead to job loss, requiring workers to navigate secondary processes and increasing risk of employment disruption.
Employers: the bill significantly expands enforcement exposure—higher civil penalty ranges, new criminal penalties, and debarment authority—raising legal risk that can threaten businesses and increase prosecutions.
Based on analysis of 14 sections of legislative text.
Strengthens and modernizes federal employment-eligibility verification, funds SSA costs, adds SSN blocking/suspension, expands employer duties and penalties, and creates identity-authentication pilots.
Requires DHS and SSA to fund and operate an upgraded employment-eligibility verification system, expands employer verification duties and penalties, creates identity-authentication pilots and victim protections for Social Security numbers, and updates civil and criminal penalties for misuse of identity/authorization documents. Many provisions change employer liability standards, state enforcement authority, and establish procedures for blocking or suspending SSN use in the verification system. Implements new audit and pilot programs, mandates interagency agreements to cover SSA costs, replaces large parts of the INA employment-verification statutory text, and phases in some changes over months to years after enactment.