The U.S. government offers the "Basic Pilot Employment Verification Program" that employers can use to quickly verify the Social Security numbers of prospective employees. A company has grounds to refuse to hire someone if their name doesn't match the SSN they provided.

Just one catch: the program is voluntary.

See "Few firms use migrant ID service" for the details. How few? Just 4,385 out of the more than 5.7 million companies in the U.S. and 101 out of 96,000 companies in Arizona. That's only partially because when the program was started in 1997 it was originally just for CA, NY, FL, IL, and TX. In 1999 NE was added, and it became nationwide in December of last year.

As pointed out in the article, many companies would be at a competitive disadvantage if they used this program and hired only legal workers, while their competition continued to hire illegal workers. For a clue as to how that might be solved, see "RICO Lawsuit Against Employer of Illegal Aliens Succeeds!"

A federal appeals court has held that companies whose competitors use illegal alien labor to underbid them may sue their rivals under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute (RICO)...