Howley on E‑Verify

Kerry Howley has a great article on the supposedly common-sense proposal to create a massive federal database of eligible workers as a disincentive to illegal immigration:

While undocumented workers probably contribute more in federal taxes than they consume in federal services, no one doubts that they pose some fiscal burden to border communities where they arrive. Still, you’d have to take an improbably extreme view of these costs to deem the SAVE Act fiscally rational. According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), the act would decrease federal revenues by $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018 as formerly tax-paying workers go underground. The costs of expanding E-verify and a bunch of other goodies stuffed into SAVE (thousands more border agents, a program to recruit former members of the armed forces to join the border patrol, more SUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles, hundreds of full time immigration investigators, expanded immigration detention centers) come to $23.4 billion in discretionary spending during the same period. And that doesn’t touch the cost to individual employers, who are being slapped with a huge regulatory burden in the midst of impending recession.

No presidential candidate has come out in favor of Schuler’s bill, most likely because the bill includes no avenue for undocumented workers who wish to become legal. Herein lies the ambitious stupidity of SAVE: If the bill works as intended, it will instantly turn the population of 12 million undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal into 12 million unemployed undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal. For a political constituency constantly worried about “anarchy,” this does not appear to be an ideal situation.

The SAVE Act may or may not come to a vote this session, but employment verification will almost certainly be a part of future compromise legislation on immigration reform. That's worrying. Walls offend us aesthetically and symbolically; they’re clumsy and primitive and cruel. But they’re also easy to tear down; far easier than a slowly metastasizing system of total employment surveillance, of growing databases and expanding bureaucracies.

Our own Jim Harper has justifiably called the e-verify program Franz Kafka's solution to illegal immigration. According to the Social Security Administration's own estimates, almost 18 million Social Security records contain errors, many of them pertaining to US citizens. If even a small fraction of those problems find their way into the e-verify program, we'd be looking at millions of American citizens suddenly forced to "prove" to federal bureaucrats that they're "eligible" to have a job. Giving the federal government the power to decide which US citizens are allowed to work for a living seems to me like a much bigger threat to our freedoms than anything illegal immigrants have done.