E-verify creates more problems than solves
Gov. Ron DeSantis says you should have to get the federal government’s permission to take any new job.
He might not word it that way, but that’s the precise purpose of legislation requiring all Florida employers to use the federal E-Verify database to validate your right to work and to fire you if it doesn’t.
That’s wrong. E-Verify is error-prone. It’s Big Brother on steroids.
In one well-known case, Jessica St. Pierre of Miami lost a new telecommunications job because her employer flummoxed E-Verify by typing in two spaces after her last name. It took her three months to fix that and find another job.
“Have you ever fought City Hall and won?” she wrote in The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress. “Imagine how hard it is to fight a computer database in Washington.”
Although unauthorized immigrants are the nominal targets of the E-Verify legislation, many citizens like St. Pierre and legal immigrants with green cards would inevitably be falsely flagged and forced at least temporarily out of work.
The law would apply to every private employer and every job applicant, whether native or foreign-born. In addition to the written form (I-9) that applicants sign and the employer keeps on file, the employer would have to send the government personal data, including name, date of birth, Social Security number and citizenship status. Florida is one of 10 states where employers also input driver license data.
The information is matched to databases at the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. If confirmation isn’t found, there are only eight federal working days to prove the system wrong. Then it’s out the door.
E-Verify is optional as far as the federal government is concerned, but the pending legislation in Tallahassee (Senate Bill 164, by Aaron Bean, R-Jacksonville, and House Bill 89, by Thad Altman, R-Indialantic) comes with sharp teeth and some conspicuous exceptions.
Employers who fail to use E-Verify, or who hire a worker the system rejects, would lose “all applicable licenses.” In other words, they’d be shut down. The unauthorized worker would be reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Occasional help hired by homeowners would be exempt, along with “independent contractors,” a category subject to much abuse. The bills encourage “good faith” complaints from anyone wanting to snitch on an employer.
Florida’s largest industries, tourism and agriculture, actively oppose it. So does the Florida Chamber of Commerce, which calls it an undue burden for job creators. They’re on the same side as the American Civil Liberties Union and most Democratic politicians.
The burden of inputting data isn’t really a compelling issue, but the consequences are.
The Department of Homeland Security says 85 percent of employers who use E-Verify were satisfied last year. That means 15 percent weren’t, a statistic that would alarm most businesses that compete for customers.
An ACLU white paper issued in 2013, citing government data, noted that one in every 400 E-Verify denials had been reversed after appeals. In crunching numbers nationwide, the ACLU projects that 400,000 workers would be “improperly deprived of the right to make a living.”
The errors are easy to make. The General Accounting Office has estimated that mandatory E-Verify nationwide would generate some 164,000 rejections each year solely on account of name changes. And that was in a report saying Homeland Security its performance.
Like President Trump, DeSantis, Bean and Altman are catering to the populist fear, fed by racial animosity, that undocumented immigrants hurt the economy by taking jobs from entitled citizens. In reality, they’re talking about jobs that few citizens seem to want, and the premise is hard to justify in the face of the full-employment figures Trump flaunted in his State of the Union speech.
DeSantis should be careful what he’s wishing for. If by magic every unauthorized immigrant were booted from a job, it would devastate the economies of Florida and other states that are dependent on their mostly unskilled labor.
Unauthorized immigrants account for 18 percent of workers in agriculture, 13 percent in construction and 10 percent in leisure and hospitality, according to a 2016 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research. They make up 5 percent of the total private sector workforce and generate 3 percent of gross domestic product. Over 10 years, their departure would cost the economy nearly $5 trillion.
There is an immutable law of economics. Where there’s a demand, it will be filled, legally or otherwise. There hasn’t been so much hypocrisy, though, since some bootleggers routinely financed the “dry” side of Southern liquor sale referendums. At least five of Trump’s own golf courses, exposed by their own undocumented employees, have fired at least 18 of them recently, according to the Washington Post. There doesn’t seem to have been a single rapist, drug smuggler or gangster among them. Immigrants actually break fewer laws than native-born Americans do.
The late Anthony Bourdain wrote in his best-seller Kitchen Confidential that “The true backbone of the American restaurant industry…remains largely Latino.”
That’s not the only reason to put the E-Verify legislation out with the garbage, but it’s a good one. DeSantis, Bean and Altman would serve Florida better by demanding real immigration reform from Trump and their Republican colleagues in the Congress.
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Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Sergio Bustos, David Lyons and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.