Welcome to America
Duke employees face snafus from proposed verification system
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Durham, NC -- Growing up in India, Karthik Jayasurya thought he’d seen his share of government red tape. Then he came to Duke to pursue a Ph.D. and waited nine months instead of a few weeks for a federal form he needed to keep his fellowship. It was a “big hassle,” he says.
Duke officials say his problem could have been worse. They warn if Congress moves ahead with proposed legislation requiring private universities to verify the status of employees with a national electronic system, some Duke employees could lose their jobs or even be deported.
Jayasurya applied for his Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) – similar to a Social Security number (SSN) – after arriving at Duke in August 2006. A month later, he was rejected without explanation. He reapplied and called to ask why he’d been rejected. After waiting on the phone for half an hour, he was told he needed to wait 60 days to find out the problem. Before that time passed, he was rejected again.
Only after visiting Duke’s International Office and checking the fine print of a brochure did Jayasurya guess that his application might have been rejected because he’d opened the wrong kind of account at a local bank. Finally, this past May, his third application yielded success.
“It was not helpful at all,” said Jayasurya, who hopes to help companies develop new medicines after he receives his doctorate in computational biology. “They don’t tell you what you’ve done wrong.” He adds that his long-awaited form spelled his middle name incorrectly. “I don’t even want to call them again,” he says.
His case is not unique. “Last year I had a graduate student apply and the process took eight months with two different applications,” says Jennifer Goins, a program coordinator in the Department of Immunology.
Catheryn Cotten, director of the International Office, tells the story of a Canadian nurse who had to stop working at Duke Hospital after her green-card application was delayed by Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The nurse is still waiting for permission to work. “It was just a mistake at DHS,” Cotten says. “We know she should have work permission, but DHS is taking months to correct its own errors, and a much-needed nurse is sitting home waiting for DHS to get its records straight and issue the document that, by law, Duke must see to let her work.”
Whether born in Chicago or Shanghai, all Duke employees must verify their employment status, but those who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents when hired are especially likely to encounter problems with their paperwork, Cotten says. This includes about 1,700 current employees and 500 to 700 newcomers annually. Like Jayasurya, many work in the sciences as graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and researchers, although hundreds of others can be found everywhere from the Fuqua School of Business to Duke Chapel.
“People from China, for example, often have one family name and two given names, and they’re not always entered in the same order,” Cotten says. “Likewise with the order of Spanish names or the order of month and day for birthdates. Then there’s the confusion with how people write the letter ‘z’ or the numbers 1 or 7, all of which can be typed incorrectly into a database.”
Cotten and her colleagues now have the power to sort though such minor discrepancies and approve the employment status of foreign-born applicants, all of whom passed security clearances before receiving their U.S. visas and arriving at Duke. But if Congress moves ahead with the proposed legislation, Duke will be required to join its public counterparts and all federal departments and agencies in verifying applicants through the national E-Verify system operated by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.
Duke’s Federal Relations Office and International Office are working with members of Congress and higher education organizations to try to prevent these requirements from being included in the final version of legislation.
“Everything we hear is that this new system is great when it works but actually leads to problems that can be very difficult to resolve,” Cotten says. “You’re caught in trying to prove that the government has made an error and trying to fix it.”
Foreign-born employees have only three months to fix problems with a Social Security number before they may lose their Duke jobs, she says, “making them a very vulnerable group. Even worse, the problem is not one they can fix, since it’s generally because of bad or incomplete information in shared government databases.”
While agreeing with the importance of preventing terrorists from slipping into the United States, Cotten says she worries how the E-Verify system will work in practice with Duke’s foreign nationals, including 55 in pharmacology and cancer biology, 50 in physics, 35 in the law school and others across the campus.
“We need a good system to focus on the people who really are a threat to us,” she says, “but these problems are a complete surprise to our international students and scholars. They have done everything right to come to Duke, but bad data proliferating across multiple government databases can create problems in getting SSNs and ITINs, going on the payroll and getting their scholarship and fellowship awards. They could not have imagined when they left home that they would face these bureaucratic difficulties.”
That’s certainly true of Jayasurya. “I was surprised it was this hard,” he says.
