Could E-Verify be used to Limit the Amount of Undocumented Labor in the US?

E-Verify can be described as a federal program designed for curbing illegal immigration. The program established in 1997 had the intention of verifying employment status through a national database of government data that determined whether or not an individual is eligible for legal employment in the U.S. While not mandatory for states to utilize this regulatory service, it has been adopted by many states and the federal government.

To see its effects in action, we can take the state of Arizona as an example. Arizona has always been the birthplace for the fight against undocumented immigration due to recent state policies like SB 1070, which allows law enforcement to demand documents proving citizenship or immigration status to anyone they suspect of being here illegally shows us their state's policy on prosecuting undocumented immigrants. In 2008, the state's legislature passed the Legal Arizona Workers Act, which prohibits employers from hiring undocumented immigrants and required them to use E-Verify to determine employment eligibility. Arizona lawmakers thought that by using this system of regulation they would curb the employment of undocumented immigrants, but it’s mixed results show us data that can be analyzed for future policies.

The number of undocumented workers fell drastically since its implementation though official data, but that reality is far from the truth. While illegal labor shrank 17%, many individuals affected either moved states, or went into the informal economy, usually hired by private contractors that were not bound by the Legal Arizona Workers Act, and doubled the rate of unauthorized low skilled employment. This was detrimental to the laborer due to less pay and worse conditions. It also had a negative effect on legal workers in Arizona because many did not want jobs that were taken from undocumented immigrants, resulting in a lower employment rate for unskilled labor.

While this problem was only localized in Arizona, where undocumented workers could easily migrate to either California or New Mexico where immigration policy is laxer, a federal implantation of this regulation would lead to a high number of workers seeking refuge in the informal economy which hinder tax collection and governmental insight on policymaking. Another interesting result from the use of E-Verify in Arizona was an increase in wages for low skilled legal labor. With an average increase of 10-20%, many employers were paying higher wages to make up for the amount of non-legal labor that they had lost. This was a result of enticing legal workers to fill the jobs that were lost from immigrants that left the state after the Act was passed. Here we can see basic economic principles at play with wages rising after a decline in the labor supply.

Quick note: Another downside of the program is that E-Verify also suffers from the continual government shutdowns present in our current. Parts of the program, Self Check, which allows individuals to verify their own employment status, and Self Lock which protects individuals by locking their SSN so others cannot apply using their to jobs with their SSN are offline. With the shutdown in 2007 (which did not impact the program too much considering many states had not adopted the system), and the recent shutdown in 2017, its obvious that the system is vulnerable to the political instability(I used this word harshly but could not find any other way to address the situation) of Washington.