How to Save E-Verify: Grow the Federal Government!
The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has written a careful defense of the “E-Verify” program, the federal immigration background check system. Unfortunately, his prescriptions for rescuing the program would grow the government in several directions – cost and intrusiveness, to name two. At root, E-Verify and “internal enforcement” of immigration law are incompatible with life in a free country under a federal government of limited scope and power.
The paper starts with an important admission that I failed to address with sufficient force in my paper on E-Verify: Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.
“Of the millions of illegal immigrants in this country,” Rector says, noting a trio of studies, “the best evidence suggests that some 50 percent to 60 percent of this employment occurs ‘on the books.’”
This means, of course, that 40 to 50 percent of illegal immigrants working in the country are “off the books.” Even a flawless E-Verify system would have no effect on their ability to work in the country. The “magnet” of working and living the United States would not even be weakened for them. Spending a billion dollars over the next four years to continue E-Verify would do about half what people think it would do.
(The $1 billion figure is Rector’s number, combining private sector and government costs. Government estimates put the five-year government cost of E-Verify at $572 million, and lost federal revenue from a similar proposed program at $178 billion over ten years.)
To make E-Verify work there would have to be more. “Additional government expenditures might be required to meet the costs of prosecuting employers,” Rector says. “[H]owever, fines on such employers could offset some or all of this enforcement cost.”
Though he doesn’t say so outright – it is “generally felt that fines are too modest” – a fair reading is that Rector would increase penalties on employers. Thankfully, he shies away from the idea of imprisoning them. We need the productive sector more than ever.
But the productive sector would be less productive under his eleven-point plan for E-Verify, which I will review and critique ever-so-briefly:
- Require universal employment verification. Taking E-Verify national would increase yet again, in yet another way, the burden on productive U.S. employers. It’s the kind of bureaucratic accretion that Republican revolutionaries in 1994 came to town to stop.
- Reauthorize E-Verify and provide adequate funding for implementation. Spend that billion dollars (and get rid of those revenues).
- Improve government data to further reduce erroneous tentative non-confirmations and provide opportunities for individuals to review the accuracy of their personal data in government files. Among other things, this is the idea that there could be a system in which people could use government-licensed contractors to check whether the information about them in government databases was correct. Perhaps “government-licensed contractors” would do a better job than the government itself of preventing identity fraudsters from checking the information of other people, but it’s not likely. At its core, a national E-Verify system requires a national biometric database to work well.
- Penalize employers who continue to employ workers who have failed verification. These are those fines – luckily, not jail – for employers.
- Facilitate information sharing between DHS and SSA. That’s dataveillance. There will be a lot more of it in the future. Real-time or near-real-time monitoring of your behavior through your data.
- Increase penalties, in law and in practice, for unlawful hiring. More fines on employers and more money spent on enforcement.
- Issue clarifying letters to employers regarding Social Security mismatch notifications. This sounds innocuous, but “clarifying” in this case creates the legal predicate for fining employers when they have failed to be good deputies of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
- Do not restrict state efforts to limit the employment of illegal aliens. This doesn’t directly grow the federal bureaucracy. It suggests states should force employers to submit to federal bureaucracy.
- Establish supplemental procedures to prevent employment by means of identity fraud. Again, a national ID is essentially required to implement a national system for adjudicating personal rights, but Rector proposes something less: a complex program where people would be notified if it appeared that their identities were being used by others in the employment sector. The logistical and data security issues with this are forbidding. It’s something like describing how to build the cathedral of Notre Dame by saying, “Well, you put up a church . . . .”
- Establish supplemental procedures to reduce “off-the-books” employment by illegal aliens. More dataveillance and more penalizing of employers.
- Incorporate the current new-hire data collection for child support into E-Verify. Yet more dataveillance – rolling employment information about every American into federal government databases.
Last week at the Heartland Institute’s 24th Anniversary Dinner, Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation debated immigration policy with Peter Brimelow of VDARE.com. Hornberger returned again and again to the theme that immigration law is a statist interference with the freedom of migrants and citizens alike.
He did not force the scales from the eyes of Brimelow or many of the other immigration opponents in the room, but people who appreciate freedom and limited government hope for the day when those scales do fall.
Filed under: Telecom, Internet & Information Policy; Trade and Immigration
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on YouTube
Cato Tweets