Yes, there is a federal program to verify the legal status of immigrants. It’s fast and efficient but most employers don’t use it. Why? They need laborers, and they don’t care about their legal status.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

  • A long-standing computer-based federal program called E-Verify makes it easy for prospective employers to spot and reject unauthorized immigrants seeking jobs.
  • Yet, in California, only about 16% of employer establishments are enrolled in E-Verify, even lower than the overall national figure of 27%, according to a Times analysis of federal data.
  • The program’s low use reflects the reality that many businesses — and the broader economy — have come to rely on undocumented immigrants. 

WASHINGTON — For all of Donald Trump’s railing against immigrants and Democrats’ insistence on creating a better pathway to citizenship, one thing almost no one ever talks about is a computer-based federal program that makes it easy for prospective employers to spot and reject unauthorized immigrants seeking jobs.

The program, known as E-Verify, is highly reliable and involves relatively little red tape. If fully utilized, many experts say, it could significantly curb the flow of undocumented immigrants by effectively removing one of the biggest reasons so many come to the United States illegally to begin with — getting a job.
Yet even though E-Verify is free for employers, with more than 98% of those checked being confirmed as work-authorized instantly or within 24 hours, the program is significantly underused.

Nationally the program is voluntary, except for certain businesses such as federal contractors. Most states don’t require employers to use it. In California, only about 16% of employer establishments are enrolled in E-Verify, even lower than the overall national figure of 27 %, according to a Times analysis of data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Its low use reflects the underlying reality that many businesses — and the broader economy — have come to rely on undocumented immigrants. And in many ways, it’s both symptomatic and an outcome of what both major political parties acknowledge is a “broken immigration system,” in which unauthorized employment has become an intractable condition that employers, consumers and politicians have lived with for years.

Employers face few sanctions for hiring undocumented workers. And the odds of getting inspected are even less than a taxpayer’s likelihood of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

Even during the Trump administration, which stepped up enforcement and publicized a few raids, such as the 2018 sweep of 7-Eleven stores in L.A. and other cities, federal agents closed 6,065 cases of unauthorized employment and labor exploitation nationwide in 2019, its peak year, involving fewer than 31,000 undocumented workers, according to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), with Republican colleagues including Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Trump’s running mate, in June introduced a bill to make E-Verify mandatory across the country. But similar efforts in the past have repeatedly failed to win enough bipartisan support.

And one key reason: There are simply not enough “legal” workers to fill all the jobs a healthy, growing U.S. economy generates. And that’s especially so in low-wage industries.

Employers say that requiring E-Verify — without other overhauls to the immigration system, including easier ways to bring in workers — would be devastating.

“I think you would see a general overall collapse in California agriculture and food prices going through the roof if we didn’t have them do the work,” said Don Cameron, general manager at Terranova Ranch, which produces a variety of crops on 9,000 acres in Fresno County.

At least half of the 900,000 farmworkers in California are thought to be undocumented, even higher than what national surveys suggest, says Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. Neither Cameron nor most anyone else in California farms, among other sectors, is in favor of mandatory E-Verify.

Even in red states, which are more prone to require and use the program, E-Verify isn’t exactly widely popular in immigrant-heavy states. While Georgia’s participation rate is among the highest, at about 85%, only about 30% of employer establishments in Texas had signed up for it as of last year.

‘The status quo makes business sense’
And enrollment was even lower in Florida, although the state last year made E-Verify mandatory for employers with more than 25 workers, sparking an immediate backlash from some businessess.

“If the documents [presented by a prospective worker] look good on their face, it’s good enough for them because they’re desperate for labor,” said Chris Thomas, a Denver-based attorney who has counseled scores of companies facing government investigations of their immigration practices.

“It’s a wink and a nod,” he said. “ The status quo makes business sense. ”

It’s not simply a matter of not having enough workers to do the hard, often dead-end and low-wage jobs that most U.S. citizens don’t want to do. It’s the shortage of workers overall, experts say.

For decades, birth rates in the U.S. have been declining, as they have in most of the economically developed world. Today, the birth rate among American women of childbearing age has dropped below the level needed to meet the country’s replacement rate. California’s birth rate is at its lowest in a century.

If the economy is to grow and prosper, as almost all Americans say they want it to, additional workers must come from somewhere else.
“It’s not in our macroeconomic interest to prevent unauthorized immigrants from working, because the U.S. population is aging,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “Because we haven’t had immigration reform to allow in more immigrants legally, people are just coming anyway, and they come in bigger and smaller numbers as our economy demands them.”

David Bier, director of immigration studies at Cato, a conservative think tank, says there’s some evidence that large-scale immigration has kept the country out of recession and increased tax revenues, contrary to what Vance has said about undocumented immigrants draining Social Security funds. Most economists agree that new arrivals have been crucial in sustaining high employment by filling many job openings in recent years.

Immigrants, for example, many of them undocumented, make up 40% of California’s home healthcare and child day-care employment, according to The Times’ calculations of Census Bureau data. That, in turn, helps other moms to stay in the labor force.

“The whole idea that these workers are bad for native-born workers — there’s not much evidence for that,” Bier said.

Bottom line: Congress must act to pass a reorganization of our immigration laws so that all immigrants enter legally.