Reviving No-Match Letters
A powerful tool against illegal employment
By George Fishman on May 29, 2025
Summary
DHS can permit, and indeed can incentivize, employers around the country to dismiss alien workers en masse whose unlawful work in the United States has first been flagged by Social Security Administration “no-match” letters.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 established “employer sanctions”, making it unlawful for an employer to hire or continue to employ an alien “knowing the alien” to be unauthorized to work. IRCA also requires employers to complete an employment eligibility verification process, reviewing specified documents provided by new hires to demonstrate their identity and employment eligibility. Unfortunately, the easy availability of counterfeit documents has largely undermined the effectiveness of IRCA’s employer sanctions.
SSA has in the past issued “no-match” letters to employers informing them of employee names and Social Security numbers the employers have provided to SSA “that do not match” SSA records. As DHS has explained, “[t]here can be many causes for a mismatch, including … the submission of information for an alien who is not authorized to work … and who may be using a false SSN or an SSN assigned to someone else…. [A] no-match letter places an employer on notice of the possibility that some of its employees … may be unauthorized to work”.
An employer can be found to have hired or continued to employ an alien “knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien” through “constructive knowledge”. In 2007, DHS published regulations providing that “an employer’s failure to take reasonable steps in response to … receiv[ing]” a no-match letter “may lead to a finding that [it] had … constructive knowledge” that “the employee referred … was an alien not authorized to work”, and thus that the employer was violating IRCA’s prohibitions. In the regulations, DHS set forth “safe-harbor” procedures employers could follow to “be certain that DHS will not find that [they] had [such] constructive knowledge”. In 2008, DHS issued revised regulations, but they were then rescinded by the Obama administration.
DHS can repromulgate its regulations without the need for any new legislation. Doing so has the potential to demagnetize the job magnet for illegal immigration and encourage illegal aliens’ voluntary departure from the U.S. to an extent approaching the impact of a statutory mandate for employer participation in E-Verify.
https://cis.org/Report/Reviving-NoMatch-Letters
