Institute E-Verify Nationally - And Do It Now

“The simple truth is that we’ve lost control of our own borders, and no nation can do that and survive.” – Ronald Reagan

1990’s Redux?

The U.S. economy is poised to make a comeback in 2014. Jobs creation has seen an uptick, car manufacturers are doing very well. It’s about time and let’s all hope that the good news we’ve gotten lately builds to a full-out recovery.

At the same time, let’s also prepare for what’s surely to come if the economy does indeed come back strong: illegal immigration.

We know from recent history that when the U.S. economy is in full swing, so is illegal entry into the country by unemployed outsiders looking to take American jobs.

We’ve also seen how these same folks who came here illegally seeking work self-deported when the economy went into recession.

I know what some of you may be thinking: These folks are only here trying to make a better life for themselves!

I agree. Except for the ‘only’ part.

The desire to do better for yourself doesn't give you the right to take something you have no claim to from someone who does have a legitimate claim to it. My neighbor has a better car than I do. My family would benefit from having a better car. Can I take my neighbor’s car? I can, but then I’d go to jail.

Thou Shalt Covet.

Yet, there are those among us who just don’t get it.

Some will argue that illegal immigrants are doing us a favor by taking these jobs, because Americans won’t do them. This is not true, and we know this: Who did this work before the onslaught of illegal workers?

Oh, and by the way…since the Great Recession, native-born employment decreased, while immigrant employment increased![i]

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that Americans won’t do this work, because Americans won’t work for the orchestrated below fair-market wage that’s being offered. So, the artificially low wage is touted as the only wage that can be paid for the labor. Some have even argued that whole crops will be abandoned and not grown if the cost of labor goes up.[ii]

Others say the only reason labor-intensive farming survives is because there are migrants (unauthorized, I presume) willing to work for low wages.[iii]

This is nonsense. The only thing that would happen is what should have already happened and would have already happened, if not for the gaming: The market will correct itself and attain equilibrium for that product.

Another argument for allowing illegal workers into the country is that these illegal workers pump money into the economy by taking these jobs and living in the States.

This too, is poppycock. Anyone who holds any job in the U.S. pumps money into the economy. Illegal immigrants don’t pump more money into the economy – in fact they put far less money in for two reasons:

1.      The jobs a low wage paying jobs, remember? A legal worker would earn more dollars and therefore put more back into the economy.

2.      Much more money would be put back into the U.S. economy if a native worker held that job: An American worker is not likely to send money to Mexico.[iv]

So far, no has been able to explain to me how it can be argued that low wage jobs are good for the economy. Those jobs, now being done by illegal immigrants, were done by legal (native) workers at fair market value wages, would pump even more money into the economy, and none of it would be sent out of the country.

The claim that illegal workers add to the economy is true, but it also true that if the same work was done by legal workers even more money would be put into the economy. Other kinds of illegal economic activity goes on, such as drug dealing, car theft and so on, and the same argument could be made: that it adds to the economy. 

Opponents of E-verify are arguing that it should be okay for a business knowingly hire an illegal worker. They should be allowed to break the law, because laws are for regular people, not the elite.

In Arizona, they passed a law making E-Verify mandatory. SB 1070 goes further, providing for the license revocation of any business that knowingly hires illegal workers. It’s called the “Business Death Penalty” and revokes operating privileges on the second offense. This, of course, has some folks up in arms as being too harsh of a penalty. Do you know of another law that you have to break twice before you face the consequences?

There’s a couple of things that get lost in all of this:

• The U.S. economy does not exist to bail out the Mexican government’s failure to provide a sufficiently robust economy for its own citizens[v]
• We have plenty of our own unemployed to deal with, we don’t need anyone else’s unemployed competing for jobs.
•  Illegal immigrants commit other crimes while here, beyond the initial crime of entering illegally: Fraud, Forgery, and Theft, Conspiracy to Commit Fraud (with the employer being the other criminal party).[vi]
•  We don’t have a shortage of unskilled unemployed workers; we don’t need more.
•  No one, not anyone from Mexico, Central or South America, no one from Europe, Africa, Asia or even Antarctica or Alpha Centauri, has a right to immigrate here, and no immigrant has a right to a job here! Mexico feels the same way about their illegals.[vii]

If you think that this is all a bit harsh, take look at how Mexico treats their illegal immigrants. If you enter Mexico illegally, you are considered a felon.[viii]

Along with this is the sense of entitlement shown by some illegal immigrants. They not only have no problem breaking our laws, they actually think this is their country.

Yet many of these same people have nothing but scorn and derision for America.[ix]

Too many of these folks don’t come here to become American, they come here for what they can take from America. Yet, we are to welcome them with open arms, educate their children, and provide them with rent assistance, food stamps, medical care, and so on, otherwise we are racists and xenophobes. All so that they laugh at us behind our backs.

The real culprit? NAFTA. 'Free Trade" has forced many who are here illegally off their own land, because the Federal Government is so generous with subsidies to Big Ag that it's cheaper for Mexico to import agricultural products than it is to grow their own.

It’s particularly sickening how our politicians pander to this crowd.

So what is to be done?

• Remove the incentive for illegal immigrants to come here.
• Deny illegal immigrants rent assistance, food stamps, access to medical treatment (except in emergencies), and education for their children.
• Punish companies that hire illegal immigrants, use E-Verify to do it, and use it nationwide (Arizona is a good model).
• Repeal so-called 'Free-Trade' agreements that are the root cause of illegal immigration. No one WANTS to leave their country and their family just so they can make a living. Because the U.S. subsidizes American grain producers to the point that it is cheaper for Mexico to buy grain from us than it is to produce it themselves forces their farmers off the land and into the U.S.

There are many opponents of E-Verify that complain that the program is too costly[x]. Well, if it is, it’s their own fault. The program itself is free. The only cost to any business are the administrative costs of transferring information already being collected (I-9 Form) to the E-Verify program.

So, if your company isn’t any good at administrative functions, then I guess it could be expensive. But, whose fault is that? Why should native workers and legal immigrants suffer because some businesses aren’t managed well? Stop promoting your cousin and hire someone competent. Or, consider that maybe you shouldn't be in business if routine administrative tasks are beyond your ability. Remember this: no business is guaranteed easy profits.

And, really, this is truly a red herring: In those states where it is mandatory, it is because it is the law. It becomes the cost of doing business, and costs are always passed on to customers. Econ 101.

However, even in states where it isn’t mandated, companies are using E-Verify voluntarily.[xi] How bad can it be when companies are doing it on their own? I think that makes it a good thing!

The argument that E-Verify is too costly, too onerous of a burden is coming from those who don't really care as much for this country as they do for lining their own pockets easily and quickly. They want the easy road, the path of least resistance. They are not patriots. They are parasites.

The time to standardize E-Verify is now - before the next onslaught of illegal immigrants is already inside our borders and doing jobs that Americans need.

“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.” – Abraham Lincoln

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[i]http://www.examiner.com/article/amid-u-s-unemployment-crisis-illegal-aliens-sending-even-more-money-to-mexico

[ii] James S. Holt, “Farm Labor Shortages and the Economic Evidence of the Declining Competitiveness of U.S. Fruit and Vegetable Producers: A White Paper,” Agricultural Coalition on Immigration Reform, 2008, http://web17.streamhoster.com/ddc/ACIR/20080429/James_S_HoltPhD.pdf

[iii] Alex Nowrasteh, “The Economic Case against Arizona’s Immigration Laws”, CATO Institute Policy Analysis, Sep. 25, 2012 http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/economic-case-against-arizonas-immigration-laws

[iv]Ibid.

[v] Talk to Pat Buchanan. He knows all about this stuff. http://www.americasfuture.net/bookmonitor/2007/2007-1-07.html

[vi] Nowrasteh, P.9

[vii] Michelle Malkin, “Police State: How Mexico Treats Illegal Aliens”. http://michellemalkin.com/2010/04/28/police-state-how-mexico-treats-illegal-aliens/

[viii] “Ley General De Poblacion (General Law Of The Population)” https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:H_bzXzbAGe4J:www.conapo.gob.mx/transparencia/lgp.pdf+mexico+ley+general+poblacion&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESictaqF5KNa50nmFlVzzT6zXOfk-Mfoko2BpKI-KHwLNheQ7zNINCf2rhkzkcbUFoTKQKJJtTjNawGIMPHKLcEaq2c9Hj792u1FNqoZlOzOOznMrZVF91q1xggN9SujviWcC8pO&sig=AHIEtbRVrEJhIlUPbac81LKbLE6sJH0meg

[ix]Thomas Sowell, “Ever Wonder Why People Who Hate America Live In America”.  http://capitalismmagazine.com/2004/07/ever-wonder-why-people-who-hate-america-live-in-america/

[x] Nowrasteh, P.11

[xi] “Employer Use of Federal E-Verify Program on the Rise”. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-06-23-everify_N.htm

Five Things The Cato Institute Got Wrong About E-Verify

To see the Cato Institute's Policy Analysis, click here.

1. The only reason labor-intensive farming exists is because there are migrants willing to work for low wages.

Especially in the era of NAFTA. What happens is a company, say, Milwaukee Tools, relocates to Mexico, taking the jobs with them. There, they hire Mexican nationals who either already possess some, albeit, rudimentary skills, or are deemed capable of assimilating said skills quickly.

While this is happening, the U.S. Federal government is subsidizing corporate grain producers in the U.S., making it cheaper for the Mexican government to import (duty free) grain from the U.S., undercutting their own farmers.

Those farmers, being forced off the farm in their own country, lack sufficient skills to get hired by the recently relocated U.S. manufacturers, flee to the U.S. in order to find work, displacing U.S. citizens due to the immigrants' willingness to work for less.

This becomes self-fulfilling. The farmer (and by ‘farmer’ I mean the large corporate farms) knows that migrants (especially illegal migrants) will work the fields for a lower wage than a non-immigrant will. This has always been the case, but since the advent of NAFTA, its never been more true.

The farmer decides that he will only hire illegal immigrants, in many case knowing they are illegal, and at times blatantly hiring them even while being audited by ICE.[1].

These unsavory employers don’t even try to recruit legal workers.The Cato Institute would have you believe that farming would cease if it weren’t for illegal immigrants.

2. E-Verify is too expensive and should be abandoned.

In its ‘Policy Analysis’, which is more marketing than analysis, Cato asserts that E-Verify can cost as much as $147 to the employer. If there are employers who spend that much to administrate a free program, then there are some people running businesses that are not very good at it.

Here, Cato uses a very old tactic: taking the most inefficient employer's costs and labeling them as standard. The tactic has been used in minimum-wage issues, regulations, etc.

Since E-Verify is provided free[2] from the federal government, the costs mentioned in the Cato analysis are “internal costs"[3] which are entirely in the control of the employer. Besides, there are always some costs in hiring that employers will temporarily shoulder – temporary because as we all know, costs are passed on to the customer.

3. Unauthorized immigrants lift everyone’s wage.

In fact, the opposite is true. In a study by George Borjas, a Harvard economist, immigration (and that would include illegal immigration) drives down the average annual wages of native workers by 4%, and by those native workers without a high school diploma, by 7.4%.[4,5]

While making this claim, Cato engages in bald-faced stereotyping racism:

“Natives have a comparative advantage in jobs that require communication, while low-skilled immigrants have a comparative advantage in brawn…”[6]

Hmmm. The statement speaks for itself.

4. E-Verify drives illegal workers to break the law.

The paper’s author claims that E-verify forces illegal workers to steal legal workers identities in order to gain work or to work ‘under the table’.

That’s like saying that drugs laws force drug dealers to lie about where their income comes from.When an illegal immigrant commits further crime, in this case identity theft, in order to earn money while here illegally, that simply reinforces the fact that illegal workers aren’t necessarily just ‘trying to better their lives’. They may be trying exactly that, but that’s not ‘all’ they’re doing.

Stealing the identity from someone who is legally employable only makes it harder for that legally employable person to work. And that may take food off their table or force them into homelessness, or to accept any low-paying job they can get, squaring the circle...

E-Verify doesn’t compel someone to steal someone else’s identity. It does, however, incentivize an illegal worker to commit more crime, thus proving that illegal workers aren’t too awfully concerned about our laws to begin with.

But, we already knew that.

5. If, in fact, all the claims made by CATO were true, then why would many U.S. companies voluntarily use E-Verify? 

Put a fair market wage on the job, an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, and there will be plenty of native born workers willing to do the job.

The only logical reason for the resistance to nationally mandated E-Verify is to provide a mechanism for unsavory business people to exploit illegal workers for their own financial gain.

It’s not about opportunity, it’s not about being unable to find native workers willing to do the work.

It's about greed.

The Cato Institute would have you think that E-Verify will destroy business and cripple the economy. It won't, but crying 'the sky is falling' is the last tool left for unscrupulous employers who feel they have a right to game the system.

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[1] http://www.ice.gov/news/releases/1205/120501seattle.htm

[2] http://www.uscis.gov/e-verify

[3]Cost Per Hire, American National Standard. Society for Human Resource Management. http://www.shrm.org/hrstandards/publishedstandards/documents/110096%20hr%20standards%20booklet_web_revised.pdf

[4] http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~GBorjas/Papers/QJE2003.pdf

[5]Steven Camarota 1998. "The Wages of Immigration: The Effect on the Low-Skilled Labor Market," Washington D.C.: Center for Immigration Studies. Camarota, Steven A. 1997. "The Effect of Immigrants on the Earnings of Low-skilled Native Workers: Evidence from the June 1991 Current Population Survey," Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 78.

[6] http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/PA709.pdf, p.7