USCIS Letter of Invitation

Office of Policy and Strategy

20 Massachusetts Avenue NW, #1100

Washington, DC 20529

January 2018

Dear E-Verify Employer,

This letter confirms that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has authorized Westat, an independent social science consulting firm, to conduct an evaluation of the E-Verify program. In preparation for this evaluation, Westat will conduct online focus groups of employers to pretest the draft questionnaire for a national survey of E-Verify users.

Your feedback on the draft questions will help Westat refine the questionnaire for the full study. If you participate in one of these focus groups, you will not be asked to participate in the full study.

The goals of the full study, to be conducted later in 2018, are to understand whether the program is working as intended and to solicit employer feedback on the effectiveness of the program. Congress is interested in this information to help determine whether a program such as 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.

We have told Westat to treat all information gathered through the focus groups as private to the extent allowable by law. The information collected in the focus groups will only be used to make revisions to the survey questions and to help refine survey procedures. To protect the confidentiality of participants, we do not know which employers Westat has selected. Therefore, you are receiving this letter from Westat, not USCIS.

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 the evaluation of E-Verify, please call the Program Manager, Steve Devine, at (202) 272-1673 or me at (202) 272-2926.

Sincerely,

Amy R. Ritualo

Division Chief (acting)

Research and Evaluation Division

Office of Policy and Strategy