Soon, the Trump administration is likely to require
employers to use the “E-Verify” system, administered by the U.S. citizenship
agency. If federal law follows Arizona law, an employer who knowingly refuses
to use the system will face the “death penalty”— the loss of legal approval to
do business (though this is now only a state power, exercised through charters
and license granted by states).
The Cato Institute is a conservative, libertarian think tank—far
from ”progressive.” Cato strongly opposes E-Verify. Here is a summary of
arguments, by Alex Nowraseth, who takes issue with a policy paper that strongly
promotes E-Verify. I now quote from Mr. Nowraseth (in bold):
A recent piece by Mark Krikorian, executive director of the
Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), argued for mandatory E-Verify as “an
important enforcement tool” and metaphorical “wall” that would prevent the
hiring of illegal immigrants. Krikorian
did not mention many of the problems with E-Verify so I will do that here after
a brief description of the system.
An E-Verify mandate would add another lay on top of the I-9
whereby employers, after collecting I-9 those forms, would enter the
information on the form into a government website. The system compares these data with
information held in the Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) databases. The
employee is work authorized if the databases decide that the data are
valid. A flag raised by either database
returns a “tentative non-confirmation,” requiring the employee and employer to
sort out whatever error has been flagged.
If the employee and employer cannot sort out the errors then
the employer must terminate the new employee through a “final
non-confirmation.”
First, Krikorian erroneously labels E-Verify as a “free
online system.” E-Verify is not a gift
from heaven, it was created by the federal government and funded by
taxpayers. E-Verify is also not free
because of the opportunity cost of the using the system. The current I-9 form costs employers an
estimated 13.48 million man-hours each year.
A national E-Verify mandate would add to that – perhaps substantially. Those are a lot of hours that employers could
otherwise spend on growing their businesses but instead must waste complying
with government rules.
Most E-Verify checks do not take much time but 46.5 percent
of contested cases in 2012 took DHS eight work days or more to resolve. During that time, employers are justifiably
reluctant to train new employees who might not be work authorized.
Employers will likely avoid that cost by pre-screening job
applicants and rejecting those who come back as tentative
non-confirmations. Workers could thus
get rejected from every job they apply for but not know a simple and
correctable error in the E-Verify database is the reason.
Second, E-Verify is ineffective at detecting illegal
immigrant workers. On top of that, E-Verify’s accuracy rates are notoriously
difficult to judge. An audit of the
system by the firm Westat found that an estimated 54 percent of unauthorized
workers were incorrectly found to be work authorized by E-Verify because of
rampant document fraud. E-Verify relies
upon the documents presented by the workers themselves to their employer. Frequently, identity information comes from
deceased Americans – a loophole the government seems incapable of closing. For instance, SSNs for roughly 6.5 million
Americans who are 112 years old or older do not have a death date attached
which means they can easily be used by illegal workers and nobody would
complain. An illegal worker using the
SSN of a deceased American would likely end up work authorized.
Another gap in E-Verify’s wall is far more difficult to
fill. Many employers ignore E-Verify
even when it’s mandated, just like they ignore other government immigration
enforcement rules. Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, and South Carolina all
mandate usage at the state level, yet usage and enforcement have been lax. In 2014, only 56 percent of employers in
Alabama, 57 percent in Arizona, 43 percent in Mississippi, and 54 percent in
South Carolina used E-Verify for new hires despite their state laws mandating
that 100 percent of employers must use the system. Since E-Verify isn’t enforced in states like
Arizona currently, we can reasonably assume that there is no hope that it will
be well-enforced nationwide. E-Verify,
like every enforcement system, must actually be enforced by people and these
states show about as little interest in doing so as the federal government does
in enforcing I-9 requirements. Any of
the proposed national E-Verify mandates will not change that dynamic.
Third, some Americans would be kicked out of the labor market
due to E-Verify. E-Verify’s accuracy
problems mean that Americans are and will continue to be barred from work due
to false positives. Roughly 0.15 percent
of all E-Verify queries result in a false “final non-confirmation.” While that is an admittedly small percentage,
if applied nationwide to an American labor pool of roughly 125 million workers,
it would result in 187,500 wrongly issued FNCs to American workers each year.
Fourth, E-Verify is supposed to help curb illegal
immigration by turning off the jobs magnet.
In the real world, E-Verify barely affects the wages of suspected
illegal immigrants.
Fifth, … expanding E-Verify through the Legal Workforce Act
would, per the CBO, cost the federal government $635 million from 2018 to 2023
while imposing $10 million in annual compliance costs on states and localities.
The CBO also estimates a minimum $200 million cost to the private sector
following passage, as employers are forced to verify an additional 50 million
employees. That’s a high price tag for a
supposedly “free” program.
Sixth, government identity requirements for employment
incentivize identity theft. A huge
cottage industry of forged identity documents sprung up after the government
first mandated that employers check the identification of new hires in
1986.
Seventh, E-Verify’s errors and loopholes mean that the
system will be quickly rendered useless if it is ever mandated universally –
which is the most positive thing I’ll say about E-Verify until it is
significantly reformed. The government
will not react to E-Verify’s failure by throwing up their hands and calling it
a day. The government would then
integrate other biometric information like fingerprints or perhaps even DNA
into a national identity system to close the E-Verify loopholes in an attempt
to make the system more effective.
