House Subcommittee Expected to Introduce Mandatory E-Verify

A U.S. House subcommittee is expected to discuss a bill that will make the E-Verify, the federal program that verified whether a worker has authorization to work in the U.S., mandatory and permanent. Introduced by the chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Policy Enforcement, Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), the "Legal Workforce Act" is expected to be debated by the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. 

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Smith and the co-author of the bill, Elton Gallegly (R-CA), said that they were pushing for Congress to expand E-Verify because “while 26 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed, 7 million individuals work illegally in the United States. On top of all the challenges Americans face today, it is inexcusable that Americans and legal workers have to compete with illegal immigrants for scarce jobs.”

But Jacob Lesniewski, an organizer with the workers justice organization Arise Chicago, says that as well as targeting undocumented workers, making E-Verify mandatory will hurt all workers.

“I think documentation status is just another tool that corporations have in their toolbox to make workers as powerless and contingent as possible,” Lesniewski says. “Remember the reality of weak worker protections, uneven application of laws and regulations, and the racist assumptions of law enforcement agents and bosses that makes it just a bit more complicated and problematic for millions of workers.”

He says that many of these provisions “put the burden of immigration on workers and not on the employers who abuse the system and who exploit workers, immigrant or otherwise.”

Raul A. Reyes, a lawyer writing in The Los Angeles Times, said that Smith and Gallegly’s faulty reasoning for making E-Verify permanent was worrying, especially considering their influence on national immigration policy.

“Funny, they [Smith and Gallegly] offer no evidence that citizens are losing out in their quest to land work picking strawberries, cleaning bathrooms or plucking chickens,” Reyes wrote. Rather than helping native workers, the program “would probably result in discriminatory hiring practices. If E-Verify were to go national, employers might be understandably hesitant to hire anyone who looked or sounded foreign-born, thereby subjecting Latinos increasingly to profiling and discrimination.”

The National Immigration Law Center said that rolling E-Verify out nationally would lead to about 770,000 people losing their jobs due to government database errors. For those workers who are undocumented, advocates fear that mandatory E-Verify will only force them further into the shadows. Tyler Moran, policy director for the National Immigration Law Center, said that it is likely to force more workers into the cash economy, and would be an especially large blow to the agricultural industry which relies heavily on undocumented labor.

This was confirmed by Craig J. Regelbrugge, vice president for government relations and research at the American Nursery & Landscape Association, who said that without any other immigration solutions, the E-Verify system along would result in a decline in US-based agricultural production and an increase in imports.

Opponents also cited the cost. The Department of Homeland Security has estimated that expanding the E-Verify system would cost the agency about $400 million per year.

But like with many other DHS initiatives, if the law gets passed it’s unlikely that states will be able to opt out. Illinois sought to ban its use by private employers, but these efforts were shot down by a federal court. Illinois instead passed a state law to try to minimize abuse of the system.

The debate in the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday will come only weeks after the Supreme Court upheld that the Legal Arizona Workers Act of 2007, which targets employers who hire undocumented workers, was constitutional. If Smith’s “Legal Workforce Act” makes it into a law, this is likely the precedent that it will be judged against. 

Yana Kunichoff is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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