The (ACLU) Friday described the E-Verify system as a "flawed" verification program. Including E-Verify in the stimulus bill would have held Americans "hostage to bad government data and even worse government database systems," said Tim Sparapani, senior legislative counsel at the ACLU. He noted that the databases on which the E-Verify program is based are outdated and flawed.

"The reason why we don't have mandatory verification is because the government hasn't done the hard work of going back and scrubbing those databases clean" of flawed and outdated information, he said. Neither has there been any effort to build system for helping out individuals erroneously identified by the system as being ineligible to work in the U.S., he said.

E-Verify opponents said its use made the employment verification process unreliable and would not have stopped people from using fraudulent IDs to get work authorization. They had also noted that many state and local governments have not signed up for the program, meaning they would have had to roll out cumbersome new processes for hiring workers and checking eligibility. Questions were also raised about the system's ability to handle a sudden surge in e-verification requests.

Mike Aitken, director of governmental affairs at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), a trade association in Alexandria, Va., praised the decision to drop the requirement from the stimulus package. But he said it should still be extended beyond March 6. "SHRM is not supportive of letting it expire," Aitken said, stressing that the focus should be on making it more reliable.

Those reliability issues are overblown, according to E-Verify backers. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the (), a Washington-based immigration watchdog group, said dropping the verification requirement was a mistake, both from a policy and a political sense. "As a policy matter, when you are spending $900 [sic] billion on job creation it should be for Americans and legal immigrants and not illegal aliens," he said.