I-9 has entered my life. No, it isn’t the newest interstate highway or the final number on a winning bingo card. It’s a lot more complicated than that.
I-9 is shorthand for a form currently issued by our government’s Department of Homeland Security to verify that employees who work for any company in America are eligible to work there.
What does ‘eligible’ mean? Well, I’m not sure, even though I’ve read the Instructions for I-9 thoroughly. What I think it means is that people who have entered the country illegally and therefore have no documentation of their right to be here should not be hired for employment by any American company. This includes Mexicans who sneak under the border patrol, Canadians who don’t have proper papers, and possibly Martians who haven’t gotten a green card.
People who were not born here but who have taken the time and trouble to obtain proper identification and documentation are eligible for hire, as long as they show their paperwork.
Evidently this law has been in effect for quite some time, but since I have been an entrepreneur for an equally long time I’ve never bumped against it. Now that I’m working for fredflare.com in the capacity of human resources development, I-9 stares me in the face.
In its simplest terms, it means that every new hire must present two pieces of identification that establish his or her identity and employment eligibility. There’s that ‘eligible’ again. In other words, you can have identification that proves who you are but doesn’t prove you have a right to be in America. Only if you can prove you have the right to be here can you then be employed.
Now that I know that I-9 exists, it’s my job to make sure every fredflare.com employee qualifies. I’ll do the right thing and backtrack if necessary but it strikes me that Homeland Security has made it hard on those of us who do belong in order to trap the relatively few who don’t. I guess that’s what government red tape is all about.
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