Tag: e-verify

“”there are non-trivial set-up, training, and compliance costs to using the system. These costs are particularly cumbersome for small firms, which a 2011 analysis suggested would spend $2.6 billion on compliance-related costs if forced to utilize E-Verify.”

The law, which is currently imposed on some or all workers in 22 states, is thus widely flouted, and smaller firms are more likely to evade it.”

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“The economists found reasons to believe that E-Verify produces “significant declines in Hispanic worker employment.” But they saw “no evidence that native-born workers benefit from E-Verify mandates,” and in fact found that those mandates “reduce employment among some lower-skilled groups of native-born workers.” Specifically, “the passage of any E-Verify mandate reduces employment among natives with a high school degree or less education by 2.7 percent,” an effect “entirely driven by reduced employment among low-skilled natives who are 16 to 40 years old.””

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“the authors did not find evidence that E-Verify lowers the actual “potentially undocumented population” in areas where the system is enforced. The authors suggest that they’re instead getting by with “increases in supplementary family income sources”—i.e., being helped by others in their households.”

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“when something goes wrong with the system, nearly half of the problem cases can take up to eight days to resolve, creating uncertainty and paralysis for both hired and hirer—and giving employers an incentive just to cut out potential workers who might have eventually made it through the system.

How often does E-Verify mistakenly mark people as legally unable to work when they should have been approved? About 0.15 percent of the time, which sounds impressive, but if it were applied to every American worker via federal mandate it would leave more than 187,000 people a year barred from work for no reason at all.

The system can be gamed with borrowed or stolen identify documents, and the low compliance with state mandates does not hold out promise of success for any federal mandate that might come along.”