LABOR SHORTAGE HINDERS E-VERIFY
In President Donald Trump’s many vocal pronouncements about stopping illegal immigration, one solution he promoted during the campaign has been conspicuously missing: a requirement that employers check whether workers are legal.
Eight states require nearly all employers to use the federal government’s online “E-verify” tool to check whether new hires are eligible to work in the U.S., but efforts to expand the mandate to all states have stalled, despite polls showing widespread support and studies showing it reduces unauthorized workers.
The campaign for a national mandate has withered amid what appears to be a more pressing problem — a historic labor shortage that has businesses across the country desperate for workers.
The urgency around that shortage was clear at a congressional hearing last week when senators pressed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on additional visas for seasonal workers.
“There’s not one manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, not one dairy farm, not one resort that can hire enough people,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-wis., chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
With the unemployment rate at a 17-year low and a Trump administration crackdown on foreign workers, lawmakers are reluctant to champion legislation that could exacerbate the labor shortage and hurt business constituents — even one aimed at illegal workers that’s popular among a broad swath of Americans.
House Republicans are forging ahead with a debate over the future of young undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, but the fate of an E-verify provision remains in limbo.
Despite his administration’s “Hire American” rhetoric, Trump and the GOP leadership have gone quiet on mandating E-verify, draining momentum from a top policy goal of grass-roots Republicans.
“The president has been very weak on this subject. Even though he’s not pushing hard for it, and even though the Republican leadership has been really sluggish on this, the Republican Party as a whole is overwhelmingly for this,” said Roy Beck, president of Numbersusa, an organization that has campaigned for a national E-verify mandate since 1996 in its quest for reduced immigration.
“Allowing businesses to employ people illegally is like the government leaving the keys in an unlocked car,” Beck said. “You’re going to get a lot of stolen cars.”
E-verify has proved effective at keeping immigrants who are in the country illegally from taking American jobs. In Arizona, which pioneered the mandatory checks in 2008, the number of unauthorized workers dropped 33 percent below what was projected without the requirement, according to a 2017 analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
The federal employment verification system, introduced more than 20 years ago, has wide public support. Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed last fall by The Washington Post and ABC News support requiring employers to verify new hires are legally living in the United States — more than double the support for building a wall along the Mexico border.
Trump touted a national E-verify mandate while running for president.
“We will ensure that E-verify is used to the fullest extent possible under existing law, and we will work with Congress to strengthen and expand its use across the country,” Trump declared in a 2016 speech in Arizona.
Trump last October listed Everify among his immigration priorities and in February, requested $23 million in his 2019 budget proposal to expand the program for mandatory nationwide use. He uses E-verify at his golf club in North Carolina, where the worker checks are required by state law, as well as other entities in Chicago, Miami and New York, according to an E-verify database of participating employers.
But it is unclear whether E-verify checks are performed across Trump’s entire domestic portfolio of hotels and golf clubs. Trump Organization and White House officials have not responded to Post inquiries.
And Trump has yet to use the platform of the presidency to rally support for a national requirement, opting instead to push for building a wall, militarizing the border and stepping up deportations.
The labor shortage in industries that most depend upon undocumented workers — like agriculture, construction and hospitality — is driving up wages and deterring state authorities from rigorous enforcement of state E-verify laws, factors that analysts say complicate any national campaign.
There is just one unemployed person for every job opening in the country, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the lowest since the government began tracking this information in 2000.
“If you cut off the labor supply like these laws do, you are going to see employers get desperate when it becomes a lot more difficult to hire, and if businesses are following the law, they have to raise wages,” said Pia Orrenius, senior economist at the Dallas Fed who found that states with universal Everify requirements typically saw substantial reductions in the number of unauthorized workers.
Orrenius’s research has shown that E-verify mandates resulted in increased wages for low-skilled workers born in the United States or otherwise naturalized. In the states that have mandated near- universal E-verify, the average hourly wages of unauthorized Mexican men fell nearly 8 percent after the requirement went into effect, while wages for U.S. born and naturalized Hispanic men rose between 7 and 9 percent.
In South Carolina, restaurateur Steve Carb, the largest employer on the resort island of Hilton Head, is struggling to staff his 12 restaurants — and having to shut down entire dining sections several days a week.
His dining establishments, from pizzerias to 450-seat waterfront seafood restaurants, now employ about 900 people but need 1,000 to function optimally, he said.
He has had to raise wages to attract and keep workers.
Dishwashers earn $13 an hour, instead of $10 a couple of years ago. Line cooks are paid between $15 and $18 an hour, instead of $13 to $15. Additional overtime costs mean tweaking the menu to stay profitable, from switching to smaller shrimp to raising the price of a plate of fish and chips by 30 cents.
“The whole island is a disaster zone right now,” said Carb, president and founder of SERG Restaurant Group. “It’s been a nightmare.”
Meanwhile, Carb noted, “there are people who are willing to work and pay taxes, but they can’t get jobs because we can’t legally hire them.”
Other restaurants will, though, he said.
Even with the threat of fines or losing their business licenses, some employers in mandatory Everify states are not complying with the program because states have shied away from enforcement actions for fear of alienating business owners.