Tracy Jan reports for the Washington Post:
In President Trump’s many vocal pronouncements about stopping illegal immigration, one solution he promoted during the campaign has been conspicuously missing — a requirement that employers check whether workers are legal.
Eight states require nearly all employers to use the federal government’s online E-Verify tool for new hires, but efforts to expand the mandate to all states have stalled, despite polls showing widespread support and studies showing that it reduces unauthorized workers.
The campaign for a national mandate has withered amid what appears to be a more pressing problem — a historic labor shortage that has businesses across the country desperate for workers at restaurants, on farms and in other low-wage jobs.
The urgency around that shortage was clear at a congressional hearing last week when senators pressed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on additional visas for seasonal foreign workers.
“There’s not one manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, not one dairy farm, not one resort that can hire enough people,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
With the unemployment rate at a 17-year low and the Trump administration cracking down on foreign workers, lawmakers are reluctant to champion a measure that could exacerbate the labor shortage and hurt business constituents — even one that is popular among a broad swath of Americans.
House Republicans are forging ahead with a debate over the future of young undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, but the fate of an E-Verify provision remains in limbo.
Despite his administration’s “Hire American” stance, Trump and the GOP leadership have gone quiet on mandating E-Verify, draining momentum from a top policy goal of grass-roots Republicans.
. . . .
************************************
Two problems that I can see:
- The Trump/GOP bogus position that we don’t need more immigrant labor, which would point toward a program both a) legalizing undocumented workers already here; and 2) expanding (not contracting) future legal immigration opportunities;
- “E-Verify” depends heavily on timely action by USCIS to grant extensions of stay and renew work authorizations. But, under Trump, Cissna, Nielsen, and Sessions, USCIS has eliminated customer service to both migrants and U.S. employers from their mission and joined the “mindless enforcement bureaucracy.”
- When immigration policy decisions are based on bias and prejudice rather than facts, bad things are going to happen. Whatever might be done to fix our broken immigration system is highly unlikely to happen under the Trump White Nationalists.
PWS
05-24-18