The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial a few days ago that I'm just getting around to reading. The subject is employment-related illegal immigration, and specifically the government's E-Verify program. The Journal takes the very sensible position that the whole system is pretty much stupid.
The Journal makes the point that the only logical way to reduce legal immigration is to increase the opportunities for legal immigration. Otherwise, as long as there is a labor shortage in the United States, it will continue to be filled by workers coming to the country illegally. Here are excerpts:
Federal immigration officials raided an Iowa meatpacking plant this month in what is being called the largest operation of its kind in U.S. history. Nearly 400 of the plant's 900 employees were arrested on immigration charges. Do you feel safer?
Ever since immigration reform died in Congress last year, the Bush Administration has made a show of stepping up enforcement. But do homeland security officials really have nothing better to do than raid businesses that hire willing workers – especially in states like Iowa, where the jobless rate is 3.5%? These immigrants are obviously responding to a labor shortage for certain jobs. Giving them a legal way to enter the country would free up homeland security money and manpower to focus on real threats.
The Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act (SAVE) was introduced by Heath Shuler, a North Carolina Democrat. The bill does nothing to increase legal immigration, which is the only realistic way to decrease illegal immigration. Instead, it throws more money at a mandatory employment verification system (E-Verify) for the nation's six million employers.
This political theater notwithstanding, the SAVE Act deserves to die on the merits. E-Verify is pitched as a check on undocumented workers. But this law would require that every worker in the country run this new verification gauntlet to change jobs.
E-Verify is currently a voluntary pilot program for new workers. About 50,000 employers use it, and studies have revealed problems galore, partly because the Social Security Administration (SSA) database on which it relies contains an error rate of around 4%. With about 55 million new hires in the U.S. annually, a 4% error rate means erroneously flagging some two million people each year. They would then have to visit their local SSA office to prove in person that they have permission to work in their native land.
Keep in mind that the SSA isn't exactly a model of speed and efficiency. By its own admission 50% of calls to branch offices and 25% to the 1-800 number aren't even answered. And what of calls that do get through? It currently takes, on average, more than 500 days to get a decision on a disability appeal. Even if E-Verify were ready for prime time, there's little chance it would reduce illegal immigration. As the CBO analysis concluded, an employment verification mandate is more likely to drive illegal aliens – most of whom now work on the books – into the underground economy, not out of the country.
It's also easy to lose perspective. Restrictionists insist that we're in the middle of an illegal alien "crisis." Yet illegal immigrant workers in the U.S. number about seven million, which is less than 5% of an overall workforce of 145 million people. Is this problem really big enough to justify a centralized federal government file on every U.S. worker?
