Immigration Now, Immigration Tomorrow, Immigration Forever

Reason's guide to reality-based reform.

From the August/September 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 11)

Rebutting the concerns of restrictionists doesn’t require “not militarizing” the Mexican border and most of the rest of what the president talked about it in May. It’s a shame that, given the opportunity to set the legislative agenda on one of the issues that defines the American experience, Bush didn’t put a reality-based plan on the table for discussion—just one more wasted opportunity in a tenure filled with them.

Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie is the editor of Choice: The Best of Reason.

Worse Than a Wall

The immigration solution everyone likes may end up hurting the most.

Kerry Howley

Anyone convinced that America is suffering from excessive diversity should peruse the seven immigration bills that were floating around the Capitol in May. Traversing the conceptual distance between the minds of Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly, members of Congress on both side of the aisle debated how high the walls should be, how onerous the fines, how long the wait to legality. Amid all this robust debate, one steadfast conviction united the almost-distinguishable ravings of center-left and center-right: the need to keep closer watch on those radical patrons of social unrest, American business owners.

Pick your acronym—EEVS (Electronic Employer Verification System) in the Senate bill, BEVP (Basic Employer Verification Program) in the widely condemned House version, NEECS (New Employment Eligibility Confirmation System) in the alternative McCain/Kennedy rendition. Each represents a federal database system that will bestow a yea or nay upon every would-be worker in the Land of the Free, whether she is surnamed Rogers or Rodriguez, born in Manassas or Mexico City. The system the American Civil Liberties Union calls a “permission slip to work” requires verification from not one but two federal agencies: the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). If any of the prominent immigration measures pass as written, every hiring decision will become a matter of public concern, subject to dual bureaucracies, two databases, and an untold number of deciders.

Verification systems poll well; they have come to represent the response of a solid middle ground, of just wanting, for goodness’ sake, to follow the law. “They do work hard,” sighs Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), pondering the plight of illegal immigrants in America, “but they are criminals.” That sentiment conveniently fails to account for lawmakers’ own part in transforming the attempt to work into a transgression worthy of deportation, and in outlining a path to legalization so burdensome, bureaucratic, and restrictive that millions of otherwise law-abiding immigrants would rather risk sanction than attempt it.

The “hate the crime, love the criminal” ruse inevitably compels a crackdown on that other class of hopeless scofflaws, employers, who become reluctant enforcers in a muddled immigration regime. A mandatory employee database system has been a staple of legislative wish lists for years, and most of the bills under consideration would scale up a voluntary test program known as Basic Pilot. In August 2005 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reviewed that program and found it to be staggering under the weight of 3,600 employers. Mandatory usage would bring that number to 8.4 million.

How does the government that brought you the prescription drug benefit debacle plan to manage an electronic system involving every employed person in these United States? The GAO needs a color-coded map to explain, but here’s the basic summary: Employers send data for every new hire to DHS, which then sends information to SSA, which then sends information back to DHS, which sends information back to the employer, who can either contest any rejected applicants and begin the process anew, risk fines for not complying, or accept the findings. The burden of contesting mistakes and keeping records lies with employers. The price tag, says the GAO, will be about $11.7 billion annually, “with employers bearing much of the cost.”

Every employee must be entered and tracked individually, which may prove impossible for employers who hire large numbers of workers on a seasonal or day-by-day basis and for businesses that depend on labor flexibility to stay competitive. It’s a 21st-century system built for a lost world of 9-to-5 employment, a retro-futuristic vision of time cards, assembly lines, and electronic surveillance.

Despite sharply negative reports from the GAO and independent contractors hired by DHS, pro-enforcement groups trot out survey data about the hundreds of hard-core verification fans out there, including user approval ratings exceeding 90 percent. “Participating employers overwhelmingly report positive experiences,” enthuses the Center for Immigration Studies. The center fails to mention what the report itself notes: That survey data reflects a percentage of the very tiny share of employers who voluntarily signed up for Basic Pilot. A large percentage of U.S. soldiers report positive experiences in the service too; under the same reasoning, we really ought to reinstate the draft.

That rosy assessment also ignores the fact that would-be employees, not employers, may be the people getting most severely screwed. According to the GAO, electronic systems fail a staggering 15 percent of the time, forcing delays as someone at manually follows up. But even a tiny percentage of false negatives could result in a national nightmare of workers on hold while DHS shuffles paper, or wrongly denied work when their employers choose not to contest the government’s findings. Sound like a recipe for lawsuits? The system’s supporters think so too. So the House bill prohibits employees from filing class action lawsuits against the government after they’ve been unjustly fired.

Why are we doing this? Even in the halls of Congress, economic arguments against immigration are losing their aura of truthiness, so pro-enforcement types are focusing on national security. And in the context of terrorism, the employer-as-border-patrol-agent makes even less sense; it presumes that terrorists come here to work.

If the next Al Qaeda operative with big plans pauses to work his way up at a meatpacking plant before committing mass murder, the Electronic Employment Verification System will probably be there to stop him. If not, well, at least everyone will have followed the law.