According to the Center for Immigration Studies. a few days ago a Republican senator proposed that the infrastructure projects employ only contractors who use e-Verify. All Republican senators voted for it. 45 Democratic senators voted against and and thus killed the amendment.
Any serious plan to improve immigration policies and practices must include mandatory e-Verify. I don’t take any Democratic proposal for immigration reform seriously if it fails to mandate e-Verify, the electronic system introduced 20 years ago to help employers verify the legal status to work, using federal databases.
But hundreds, if not thousands, of employers do not use e-Verify. In agriculture, most agricultural growers in the West do not use e-Verify. Why not? Because they have trouble attracting enough workers during peak seasons and if they use e-Verify they will not be able to hire many of those who they have relied on for years and decades. This has been a fundamental difference between ag operations in the Midwest and East and those in the West. The opposition to mandatory e Verify is as much from large and small employers who are often Republican. So opposition to mandatory eVerify is not simply a partisan divide. And mandatory eVerify does not address what will happen if many growers are unable to harvest crops. The implicit assumption has been that using eVerify will not make it difficult for some operations to find adequate labor. We have employed undocumented immigrants to provide agricultural labor for more than one hundred years – there is a reason for that and mandatory eVerify would not solve that problem.
Patrick,
Sorry it took me a few days to reply. I agree with your assessment. Mandatory e-Verify is good policy only in the context of normalization of the immigration status of unauthorized workers, who are about 8 million. Peter