Advance Letters

ATTACHMENT E:

ADVANCE LETTERS FOR WEB SURVEY OF EMPLOYERS

 Web survey email communication from Westat

 Web survey authorization letter from USCIS

Dear «FirstN» «LastN»,

As explained in the attached letter from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Westat is conducting an evaluation of the E-Verify employment verification program that

«CompanyName» is currently using. We request your participation in this evaluation by completing an online survey about E-Verify. Your perspective as an employer participating in this Program will help to determine what aspects of E-Verify are working well and what features need to be added or modified. All information collected through the survey will be treated as highly confidential, to the extent allowable by law.

If you are not the person at your establishment who is most familiar with the E-Verify Program, please provide us with the name, email address, and phone number of the person we should be contacting.

To complete the online survey, please click on the following link or copy and paste it into your web browser: https://www.EVerifyStudy.org/index.asp

Your user login is: «uLogin»

Your password is: «uPwd»

Westat will not provide the USCIS or others, who are not part of the evaluation team, with data containing identifiable information about organizations or individuals. Only summaries of results, which do not permit identification of individual respondents or corporate names or locations, will be released to the public. The web survey takes approximately30 minutes to complete. After completing the online survey, you will be given the opportunity to print the questions including your responses.

To be included in our evaluation, please complete and submit your survey as soon as possible. If you have any questions about this evaluation or if you have any difficulties logging in, please feel free to contact us at 1-888-xxx-xxxx or xxxxx@westat.com.

Thank you in advance for your participation. Sincerely,

The USCIS Study of Employment Eligibility Team at Westat xxxxx@westat.com

1-888-xxx-xxxx

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Office of Policy and Strategy

_{Washington, DC 20529}

_{Dear E-Verify User:}

June 2012

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is pleased that you have volunteered to participate in the E-Verify Program, which is administered jointly by USCIS and the Social Security Administration.

An integral part of this Program, as described in the Memorandum of Understanding that you signed when you registered to participate in E-Verify, is an evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the Program. The goals of the evaluation are to understand whether the Program is working as intended and to determine whether the Program is protecting against discrimination, safeguarding privacy, and avoiding undue employer burden. Congress is interested in this information to help it determine whether E-Verify should be made mandatory for a larger group of employers and, if so, what modifications to the current Program need to be made. Your participation in this evaluation will, therefore, be an important factor in the future direction of employment verification in this country.

As part of this evaluation, we have authorized Westat, an independent social science research firm, to conduct a survey of 3,000 E-Verify participants. Westat will not provide the USCIS, U.S. Department of Homeland Security or others who are not part of the evaluation team with data containing identifiable information about organizations or individuals. Only summaries of results, which do not permit identification of individual respondents or corporate names or locations, will be released to the public. We plan to publish the final report with the survey results on the Web; this will give you an opportunity to see how the information that you and others provide is being used to improve the E-Verify Program.

I would very much appreciate your full cooperation with Westat’s request that you participate in this important evaluation, entitled the Study of Employment Eligibility (SEE). On behalf of USCIS, I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for your participation in the E-Verify employment verification program. If you have any concerns regarding this evaluation of the Program, please call Natasha McCann, Program Manager, or me at (202) 272-8122.

Sincerely,

Tiffany Lightbourn, Ph.D.

Chief, Research and Evaluation Division

Office of Policy and Strategy