Immigration and Employers

In case you missed it, read a July 16 Wall Street Journal editorial titled “Blame the Employers.”

The piece noted that the Obama administration is now following the misguided Bush administration’s blame-the-employer policies regarding immigration enforcement. The editorial highlights the problems with the government’s E-Verify system/database to verify the legal status of workers, and the fact that E-Verify cannot catch identity fraud.

And as for the proposal to go to a national biometric ID card, the Journal asks: “But if national ID cards are the silver bullet, why does Europe have so many illegal immigrants despite ID systems that have been in place for decades?”

The Journal correctly concludes: “The broader issue is that the Obama Administration, like its predecessor, has accepted the premise that the key to curbing illegal immigration is a crackdown on employers. That premise is false. Our illegal workforce results from a government policy that severely limits foreign access to U.S. labor markets… What U.S. employers need is legal access to willing workers, not more red tape in the form of a federal worker-verification system.”

Raymond J. Keating
Chief Economist
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council