Trump not pushing hard for mandatory 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, at restaurants, farms and in other lowwage jobs.
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 foreign 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.
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.
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.
“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.”