ICE’s Thursday raid on a California marijuana farm exposed that undocumented minors were allegedly working there, upping the ante for the federal government’s illegal immigration crackdown. Nine unaccompanied children were rescued from Glass House Farms, a cannabis farm in Carpinteria, Cal. during the bust, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The raid culminated in pro-illegal-immigration protesters’ aggressively confronting the National Guard.
The episode is yet more evidence that the so-called humanitarians of this story — Democrats and progressives opposing ICE deportations — are causing harm to the population they’re claiming to support. More importantly, it shows that some agricultural companies are still supplying a major incentive for illegal immigration: employing illegal labor. Illegal farm workers make up approximately 50% of the farm labor workforce in the U.S. These employers’ complicity has been historically hard to combat, but nationally mandating E-Verify could change the game.
E-Verify is an online program developed by the Department of Homeland Security that allows an employer to check applicants’ eligibility for employment by inputting their tax and Social Security information. Though E-Verify is a federal program, states such as Arizona, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, require all employers private and public to use it. Another 18 states mandate that private contractors that do business with the government use it. But many blue states — including California — refuse to touch it.
To be sure, E-Verify is not foolproof. Some of the documents that the program allows, such as a voter-registration card, birth certificate, and driver’s license can be easily counterfeited or borrowed. A report by the independent research firm Westat, using a sample from a three month period in 2008, found that E-Verify was accurate 96 percent of the time. Some 3.3 percent of those screened by E-Verify were told they were work authorized when they were not.
Still, E-Verify remains one of the best tools at the administration’s disposal. Businesses should be required to use this system, which stands the best chance of shutting down the market for illegal labor and therefore stemming the flood of illegal aliens to our border, hopefully for decades to come. As of now, employers only have to fill out a Form I-9 documenting an alien’s authorization to work, which the government rarely verifies.
A former hotel mogul, Trump is understandably sympathetic to sectors that use low-skilled workers. Yet this is labor that might otherwise be provided by Americans if the prevalence of illegal labor didn’t suppress wages. The administration’s recent seeming concession to the agricultural, hotel, and restaurant industries when it comes to ICE enforcement indicates that we’re straying from what is needed to stop future migration flows: ending the job magnet for illegal immigration. Facing lobbying from hotel owners and farmers, the Trump administration recently launched a program to streamline issuing visas for temporary migrant workers. The administration has faced criticisms that this program constitutes amnesty or “amnesty lite.”
As I mentioned on Sean Spicer’s show Thursday, this all feels like déjà vu for those who remember the infamous Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, touted as a legislative victory by President Reagan at the time. In reality, that law cost immigration restrictionists a lot: amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal aliens in exchange for promises of border security and employer sanctions that were never kept.
Though the bill enacted penalties for employers who knowingly hired unauthorized immigrants, making such hiring explicitly illegal, the ban went largely unenforced. In 2004, only three employers were fined for knowingly hiring illegals. Employers in practice only had to meet loose filing requirements, relying on easily falsifiable Social Security cards, rent or utility receipts, and other such documents, to “prove” legal hiring. Nor were employers held responsible for validating the authenticity of the documents they received. They merely needed to maintain copies that could be audited by the federal government.
The 1986 law ended up being a betrayal to conservatives. The administration risks the same betrayal again if it doesn’t target illegal labor, especially in agriculture, with gusto.
The Trump White House has tried to carefully manage the political optics and PR of the border issue by emphasizing first and foremost the criminal illegal aliens — murderers, child abusers, and other predators — that they’re arresting and deporting. It has tried to use both carrots and sticks to accelerate the rate of illegal aliens exiting the country. They’ve offered $1,000 and a plane ticket to individuals who agree to self-deport, and a $998 per day fine on those who overstay while under deportation orders. But the MAGA base isn’t satisfied, demanding a more aggressive approach as it is now on “amnesty watch.”
Mandatory E-Verify is a great way to target the source of the illegal-immigration problem. It’s already been implemented somewhat; approximately half of all new hires across the nation currently get screened through E-Verify. But this needs to be more ambitious. The administration should revive “no-match” letters informing employers when an employee’s name and Social Security number (SSN) do not match the SSA’s records, flagging potentially illegal alien workers engaging in identity theft. Employers should be made to understand that there will be consequences if they don’t dismiss employees they can’t verify.