Conservatives Support Small Business – Then Enact Programs to Harm

Turning Employers into Immigration Agents Doesn’t Help Employers

Many, not all, but many Conservatives are so strongly opposed to illegal immigration that want to make small business employers part of the law enforcement effort. (In Alabama they also want to turn the teachers into the Border Patrol, but that’s another story).  The reason for trying to use employers comes down to money.

Law enforcement takes dollars, in fact what it takes are tax dollars.  Conservatives think tax dollars have a better use, mainly to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.  So there just isn’t enough money for border control that will meet their standards.  So the plan is to require employers to enforce the law, mainly by placing huge penalties on employers that hire persons who are in the country illegally.

Employers are supposed to check the immigration status of people they hire.  But the program doesn’t work quite the way everyone thinks it does.  In most people’s minds an electronic check through E-Verify, taking a minute or so is all that is required.  Nope, that’s not it.

E-Verify can be used only to check immigration status after a worker is hired, not to screen job candidates or check on existing employees.

So here is the experience of small business

To ensure that he take on only legal employees, co-owner Bert Lemkes enrolled the $20 million business in E-Verify, a federal program that matches data on new hires, such as Social Security numbers, with government records.

Lemkes says E-Verify has made it harder to find enough workers for his 37 acres of greenhouses, especially during spring growing season, when he employs up to 350 people. Though the U.S. unemployment rate is stalled above 9 percent, business owners such as Lemkes say few native-born workers are willing to do tough jobs, leading employers to hire immigrants. “Those who want to work fail to pass E-Verify, and those that pass fail to work,” he says.

And after going through the process of hiring people and then checking

Lemkes says he has had to fire more than 60 recent hires. Although E-Verify’s proponents argue the unemployed will replace the undocumented, Lemkes says that hasn’t happened. “Without comprehensive immigration reform, [verification requirements are] going to kill agriculture,” he says.

And the cost, well that is going to hit small business hard

Small companies will be particularly burdened by E-Verify because they lack dedicated human resources staff to manage the system, says Rebecca Smith, an attorney at the National Employment Law Project. While businesses with fewer than 500 workers employ about half the U.S. labor force, if the program were mandatory those companies would bear 99 percent of the $2.7 billion in costs for E-Verify (mostly paying their own staffers or consultants to do the searches), Bloomberg Government estimates.

To the extent that government is failing in the battle against illegal immigration, it is doing so in part for lack of adequate funding.  Turning small business owners into immigration enforcement officers will not do much to prevent illegal immigration, but it will do a lot of harm to small businesses.  But that’s okay small business, remember, Conservatives are there to help you.