A border wall alternative that is worth considering

PRESIDENT Trump appears dead set on allowing a partial shutdown of the federal government if Congress doesn’t provide $5 billion for a border wall. With a Friday night deadline looming, his focus has been on strengthening security. A prominent conservative believes Trump should frame the debate instead in economic terms.

Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says Trump would be better served to demand that Democrats who vehemently oppose the wall spend that money improving the federal E-Verify system.

E-Verify lets employers check whether documents presented by potential workers match up with an existing Social Security number or whether they’re forged. The program is more popular with the public than the wall, Mac Donald notes, and in states where E-Verify is required, it has had an impact.

“Illegal aliens dropped off the payrolls in Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina, prompting employers to hire legal workers, according to a 2013 study conducted by Bloomberg Government,” Mac Donald writes at City Journal. “A 2017 study by Carnegie Mellon University found that Arizona’s E-Verify law induced return migration from Arizona to Mexico and decreased illegal immigration into Arizona from Mexico.”

Yet many employers choose not to use the system, and enforcement is “spotty,” she says. To work as intended, she argues, E-Verify needs to be made universal and enforced.

There have been efforts in Congress to do that, most recently the Legal Workforce Act by Reps. Lamar Smith, R-Texas and Ken Calvert, R-Calif. Among other things, this bill would phase in the E-Verify mandate gradually, starting with the largest businesses, and give agricultural businesses 2 ½ years to comply. The bill is backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but like other E-Verify attempts it has stalled.

Mac Donald argues that a more extensive and better-secured wall is still needed, and the asylum process needs to be improved. In addition, pointing to Smith’s estimate that illegal labor reduces Americans’ wages by $100 billion per year, largely impacting lowskilled Americans, Mac Donald contends the best way to restore control of our borders in the long run is to prevent illegals from taking those jobs.

Switching funds from the wall to E-Verify “would force Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to go on record opposing a legal workforce,” she says.

White House adviser Steven Miller said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the administration would do “whatever is necessary to build the border wall.” Thus, a change of course seems highly unlikely. Still, Mac Donald has offered an alternative worthy of consideration at some point.