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.
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
from the federal government, the costs mentioned in the Cato analysis are
“internal costs"
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%.
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…”
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.
