Republicans Poised to Block E-Verify Allowing Aliens to Keep Their Jobs

By Joe Guzzardi
October 6, 2011

To the delight of the Washington, D.C. pro-immigration lobby, House Judiciary Committee chair Lamar Smith has hit strong Republican resistance on his mandatory E-Verify legislation, H.R. 2885 also known as the Legal Workforce Act.

An anti-E-Verify coalition that includes national political consultants, ethnic identity advocates, open borders liberals and the agriculture industry have brought pressure to bear on House Speaker John Boehner, Majority leader Eric Cantor, Whip Kevin McCarthy and Chair of the Committee on Ways & Means Dave Camp to not bring the bill to the floor for a full vote.

Apparently, House Republicans have listened to the bad advice that Americans are not enthusiastic about E-Verify and that implementation of H.R. 2885 would offend Hispanics.

On the first count, Republicans are dead wrong. Not only do Americans overwhelmingly support E-Verify, polling also indicates that U.S. consumers are much more likely to shop at a venue which displays a sticker indicating that the business checks its employees for legal status. This represents a win-win because E-Verify puts Americans back to work while giving struggling retailers an advantage over competitors who don’t participate. Secondly, unemployed legal Hispanics are as eager to work as anyone else.

The Legal Workforce Act would move more unemployed Americans into jobs more quickly than any Congressional bill, especially President Obama’s $450 billion American Jobs Act. With more than 22 million Americans either unemployed or underemployed while eight million illegal aliens hold jobs, the Republicans, despite their protestations, give evidence that they really don’t care about American workers.

During the nine months since the Republicans took control of the House, they have established a track record on non-job creation as disgraceful as the Democrats. Since January, the GOP leadership has done nothing to move millions of illegal aliens out of non-agricultural jobs. Now, by blocking E-Verify, Republicans are killing off their best opportunity in decades to put Americans back to work.

Although the Republican’s lofty rhetoric about jobs matches the Democrats, when it comes time to act on essential E-Verify legislation, the GOP is paralyzed. Worse, the party offers as an excuse for its inertia that it doesn’t want to debate legislation that isn’t directly related to jobs—as if the Legal Workforce Act is not.

In the meantime while both parties are sinking in quicksand, it is worth noting that since the start of the 2007 recession America’s potential labor force—that is, working-age people who want jobs—has increased by nearly 8 million people. But over the same period, the number of Americans who are working has shrunk by more than 300,000.

In other words, there’s a growing net deficit of actual workers to potential workers. Symbolic of how deep the crisis is, in August the United States created zero net jobs.

America is in the midst of an ongoing jobs depression—the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression.

If Republicans stymie E-Verify, they will doom unemployed Americans to an ever deepening morass of hopelessness. E-Verify, on the other hand, would immediately open up millions of jobs in all sectors that Americans would be eager to work in.

Joe Guzzardi has written editorial columns, mostly about immigration and related social issues, since 1986. He is a Senior Writing Fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and his columns are syndicated in various U.S. newspapers and websites. Contact him at [email protected].