Skip to main content
Menu

Main navigation

  • About
    • Annual Reports
    • Leadership
    • Jobs
    • Student Programs
    • Media Information
    • Store
    • Contact
    LOADING...
  • Experts
    • Policy Scholars
    • Adjunct Scholars
    • Fellows
  • Events
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Event FAQs
    • Sphere Summit
    LOADING...
  • Publications
    • Studies
    • Commentary
    • Books
    • Reviews and Journals
    • Public Filings
    LOADING...
  • Blog
  • Donate
    • Sponsorship Benefits
    • Ways to Give
    • Planned Giving
    • Meet the Development Team

Issues

  • Constitution and Law
    • Constitutional Law
    • Criminal Justice
    • Free Speech and Civil Liberties
  • Economics
    • Banking and Finance
    • Monetary Policy
    • Regulation
    • Tax and Budget Policy
  • Politics and Society
    • Education
    • Government and Politics
    • Health Care
    • Poverty and Social Welfare
    • Technology and Privacy
  • International
    • Defense and Foreign Policy
    • Global Freedom
    • Immigration
    • Trade Policy
Live Now

Cato at Liberty


  • Blog Home
  • RSS

Email Signup

Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!

Topics
  • Banking and Finance
  • Constitutional Law
  • Criminal Justice
  • Defense and Foreign Policy
  • Education
  • Free Speech and Civil Liberties
  • Global Freedom
  • Government and Politics
  • Health Care
  • Immigration
  • Monetary Policy
  • Poverty and Social Welfare
  • Regulation
  • Tax and Budget Policy
  • Technology and Privacy
  • Trade Policy
Archives
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • Show More
February 16, 2021 6:48PM

Sens. Romney and Cotton Propose Universal E‐​Verify and Minimum Wage Hike

By Alex Nowrasteh

SHARE

Senators Romney (R-UT) and Cotton (R-AR) announced that they intend to introduce a bill to raise the national minimum wage and mandate E-Verify for all new hires in the United States. Immigration restrictionists have tried to use minimum wages to reduce immigration for more than a century. Combining a high minimum wage with E-Verify is not as surprising as it first seems. Restrictionists assume that higher minimum wages will increase unemployment for lower-skilled workers, which it will, and that will mostly force lower skilled immigrant workers out of the country entirely.

E-Verify is an electronic eligibility for employment verification system that checks identities of newly hired workers against government records to guarantee that they are legally employable. Since 1986, illegal immigrants have not been legally allowed to work in the United States. E-Verify is based off a Reagan-era employment verification form called the I-9. After collecting I-9 forms from employees, the employer enters the worker’s information into a government website. The system then compares these data with information held in Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases. SSA checks the validity of the Social Security number while DHS checks immigration status.

Employers are supposed to fire new employees if E-Verify flags them as being in the United States illegally. In this way, E-Verify is supposed to turn off the jobs magnet that attracts illegal immigrants in the first place. Proponents of the system, such as Sens. Romney and Cotton, believe that illegal immigration would decline and many would return home without that economic incentive to be here. There are many reasons why E-Verify won’t work as they intend.

First, E-Verify is a regulation intended to reallocate jobs from illegal immigrants to native-born Americans. Right off the bat, E-Verify promises to be an additional regulation that raises the cost of hiring without a promise to create new jobs. No one should ever confuse E-Verify with an attempt to increase employment opportunities. Since compliance with regulations costs money, the only outcome will be a reduction in production and employment. State-level evidence show that E-Verify mandates destroy jobs for illegal immigrants, they do not reallocate jobs to natives, they do not increase native wages, and they mostly do not reduce the population of illegal immigrants. Thus, the overall effect of an E-Verify mandate is a smaller economy. This is a bad policy at any time, but especially so in the aftermath of the COVID-19 recession.

Second, E-Verify doesn’t kick illegal immigrants out of the labor market. We know this from experience as many state governments like Arizona and Mississippi have mandated E-Verify. Arizona first did so in 2008 and advocates “promised [it] as the silver bullet to immigration problems. E-Verify was going to solve our challenges with immigration,” said former Arizona Republican state Senator Rich Crandall. Many illegal immigrants left Arizona after E-Verify was passed but the exodus stopped as soon as the system was implemented because workers and businesses figured out how to circumvent it. Since then, E-Verify forced illegal immigrants to leave states where it’s mandated.

Third, virtually all illegal workers in the United States know how to fool E-Verify. In August 2019, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided several meat processing plants in Mississippi and detained 680 illegal immigrant workers. This wasn’t supposed to happen as E-Verify had been mandated in Mississippi for about 8 years at that point. Anti-immigration activists sold E-Verify as a silver bullet program but it turns out that it was shooting blanks.

As I wrote in a piece for Politico, this is how some illegal immigrant workers get around the program:

Undocumented immigrant workers get around E-Verify mandates in several ways. The first is by taking advantage of E-Verify’s biggest weakness: It checks the identification papers, not the worker. Thus, an undocumented immigrant worker can pass an E-Verify check if he hands somebody else’s identification to his employer. According to an audit for the federal government conducted by Westat, about 54 percent of undocumented immigrant workers are approved to work by E-Verify for this very reason.

The workers sometimes steal IDs, but many also borrow them from friends or family members. The story of a young undocumented immigrant named “Manuel” explains how so-called identity loans work. Manuel needed identification to work in the unionized construction industry in San Francisco. He contacted an uncle in Mexico who had obtained a Social Security number in the early 1970s but then returned to Mexico permanently. The uncle let Manuel use his SSN and forge a new green card with his uncle’s name. Since there is no victim of this kind of fraud, identity loans are extremely difficult to stop.

Thus, E-Verify mandates incentivize identity theft by making government identification documents more valuable. Proponents of E-Verify have not proposed any solution to E-Verify except, in their less careful moments, advocating for a national biometric identity card.

Fourth, virtually all businesses know how to fool E-Verify by not using it. In Mississippi, for instance, only about half of all new hires were run through the system even though 100 percent were supposed to be cleared. E-Verify use rates in the other mandated states aren’t much better. South Carolina, which also has an E-Verify mandate, has supposedly solved that problem by using state audits but they still have a low E-Verify compliance rate.

Fifth, some politicians endorse E-Verify because it doesn’t work and because doing so allows them to have it both ways: Supporting E-Verify makes them look tough on illegal immigration while businesses and economies aren’t much affected because it’s easy to evade. Thus, politicians who support E-Verify get the political benefits without their constituents paying the economic costs. Many politicians support E-Verify because they believe its hype, to be sure, but political conviction is greater when principle is cheap.

Sixth, E-Verify is not a free and easy program. Cheerleaders of E-Verify claim that it is a free and easy system to use. No government program is free as they are all funded by American taxpayers. Furthermore, complying with E-Verify costs employers and workers a lot of money. Filling out the I-9 form costs employers an estimated 13.5 million man-hours annually, while 46.5 percent of contested E-Verify cases took longer than eight working days to resolve. Businesses and workers would rather spend that time in more productive pursuits than filling out government paperwork. By reducing employment even more by raising the cost of hiring workers, E-Verify could stop firms from producing many billions of dollars worth of economic output annually. A hypothetical nationwide E-Verify mandate would sacrifice many millions more work hours on the altar of immigration enforcement.

I oppose E-Verify because it’s an expensive labor market regulation that will reduce economic output for no gain. The only way to permanently and substantially reduce illegal immigration is to increase lawful immigration so people don’t have to come here illegally. But E-Verify’s ineffectiveness makes the program a lot less scary. An immigration enforcement program that worked and seriously reduced the size of the U.S. illegal immigrant would greatly harm the U.S. economy. E-Verify is not that scary because it doesn’t work and it can’t work unless it’s tied to a biometric national identity program like many E-Verify proponents want. The real mystery is why immigration restrictionists still support it after its many failures. Immigration restrictionists need to go back to the drawing board if they want to have a hope of finding a way to enforce immigration laws.

An earlier version of this blog post stated that Sens. Romney and Cotton intend to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Related Tags
Immigration

Stay Connected to Cato

Sign up for the newsletter to receive periodic updates on Cato research, events, and publications.

View All Newsletters

1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20001-5403
202-842-0200
Contact Us
Privacy

Footer 1

  • About
    • Annual Reports
    • Leadership
    • Jobs
    • Student Programs
    • Media Information
    • Store
    • Contact
  • Podcasts

Footer 2

  • Experts
    • Policy Scholars
    • Adjunct Scholars
    • Fellows
  • Events
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Event FAQs
    • Sphere Summit

Footer 3

  • Publications
    • Books
    • Cato Journal
    • Regulation
    • Cato Policy Report
    • Cato Supreme Court Review
    • Cato’s Letter
    • Human Freedom Index
    • Economic Freedom of the World
    • Cato Handbook for Policymakers

Footer 4

  • Blog
  • Donate
    • Sponsorship Benefits
    • Ways to Give
    • Planned Giving
Also from Cato Institute:
Libertarianism.org
|
Humanprogress.org
|
Downsizinggovernment.org