Southern States Welcome Immigrant Labor While Pretending to be Against It

E-Verify is a website provided by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  It is intended to be used by employers to verify the eligibility to work of a new employee.  On it information provided by the employee is compared with government data to determine eligibility.  Since 2007, DHS has required all federal contractors and vendors to use it.  Use by the states is uneven.  Thirteen states require only that some public employers and contractors use it.  However, some deeply red states have demonstrated their contempt for those who look the other way when illegal immigration is mentioned by passing laws requiring all employers to use the system and mandating severe penalties for businesses that are not in compliance.

The Wikipedia entry on E-Verify refers to a 2016 paper by Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny titled Do state work eligibility verification laws reduce unauthorized immigration?  The authors provided this summary of their findings.

 “This study uses data from the 2005–2014 American Community Survey to examine how such laws affect unauthorized immigrants’ locational choices. The results indicate that having an E-Verify law reduces the number of less-educated prime-age immigrants from Mexico and Central America—immigrants who are likely to be unauthorized—living in a state. We find evidence that some new migrants are diverted to other states, but also suggestive evidence that some already-present migrants leave the country entirely.”

This claim suggests that the system seems to be working somewhat as planned.  However, there is other evidence that the system is purposely being ignored—and not by the people one might expect.

Margaret Newkirk provided a look at how these aggressive anti-immigrant states have performed over the years in a Bloomberg Businessweek article titled The South’s Pretend War on Immigration in the paper version, and online as E-Verify Laws Across Southern Red States Are Barely Enforced.  She provides this perspective.

“In 2011 states across the Southeast passed laws that threatened private employers with dire consequences—including losing their license to do business—if they didn’t enroll with a federal data service called E-Verify to check the legal status of new hires. Modeled after 2008 measures in Arizona and Mississippi and billed as a rebuke to a do-nothing Obama administration, the laws went further than those in the 13 states that required checks for new hires only by state agencies or their contractors.”

“Seven years later, those laws appear to have been more political bark than bite. None of the Southern states that extended E-Verify to the private sector have canceled a single business license, and only one, Tennessee, has assessed any fines. Most businesses caught violating the laws have gotten a pass.”

It should not be surprising that business would be unhappy if companies began losing licenses over a few illegal employees, but students of dysfunctional government should be impressed at the way that occurrence was ruled impossible.

“In Georgia the department charged with auditing compliance with the E-Verify law has never been given money to do so.”

“In Mississippi no one seems to know who enforces the E-Verify law. The mandate appears to give that job to its Department of Employment Security, which knows nothing about it and referred questions to the attorney general’s office, which says it doesn’t know who’s responsible.”

“….in Alabama, where the state labor department points to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, which neither enforces the law nor knows who does. District attorneys, who field complaints under the mandate, say enforcement falls to the state attorney general’s office, which hadn’t heard that. ‘What is it we’re supposed to be doing?’ spokeswoman Joy Patterson asks. ‘I’m not aware of anything like that’.”

“In Louisiana, where the law against hiring unverified employees can lead to cancellation of public contracts or loss of business licenses, no contract has been canceled, no licenses have been suspended, and the state reports zero ‘actionable’ complaints since the mandate went into effect in 2012.”

Noncompliance has long been practiced and has been raised to an art form.

“It’s been against federal law since 1986 to knowingly hire undocumented workers. The “knowingly” language spawned a cottage industry of fake documents, layered hiring—subcontractors who hire subcontractors who hire subcontractors—and the use of temp agencies and independent contractors, all shielding employers from knowledge of a worker’s status.”

Some states have made it clear that noncompliance is intended.

“Many states with E-Verify laws built in loopholes from the start, including exemptions for seasonal workers (North Carolina) and farmworkers, fishermen, maids, and nannies (South Carolina). Business groups fought hard for those loopholes.”

Newkirk points to the recent Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary as an example of the hypocrisy.

“Almost as evidence of their own futility, the E-Verify laws were absent from Georgia’s recent GOP gubernatorial primary. Despite campaigning on how tough they would be on immigrants, neither candidate referred to the laws. The winner, Brian Kemp, ran ads saying he’d haul illegals away in his pickup.”

Immigrants come because they believe there will be jobs.  The South shouts “Stay away,” but whispers “Keep coming.”