House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith recently introduced H.R. 2164, which requires all employers to verify the legal status of their new hires. Rep. Smith argues that the bill will reduce the employment of illegal immigrants. He also argues that there are plenty of less-educated Americans available to fill jobs vacated by illegal immigrants. Smith’s bill stands in stark contrast to President Obama’s approach, recently repeated in El Paso, that would allow illegal immigrants to remain permanently in their jobs and increase the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country each year.

To shed light on these differing approaches, the Center for Immigration Studies is publishing a detailed analysis of the employment situation for less-educated workers in the first quarter of this year – workers who are the most likely to compete with illegal immigrants for jobs. The report is online at http://www.cis.org/no-need-for-more-immigrant-workers-q1-2011.

Among the findings:

• In the first quarter of 2011, the standard unemployment rate (referred to as U-3) for U.S.-born workers who have not completed high school was 22 percent.
• Using the broader measure of unemployment (referred to as U-6), that includes those who want to work but have not looked in the last four weeks and those forced to work part-time, the rate for U.S.-born workers who have not completed high school was 34.6 percent.
• The U-6 unemployment rate for U.S.-born workers who have only a high school education, but no additional schooling, is 21.5 percent. The situation for younger workers with only a high school education is even worse.
• Looking at all less-educated U.S.-born adults (ages 18 to 65), 26.9 million were not working in the first quarter of 2011. Less-educated is defined as having either failed to complete high school or having only a high school education.
• If we include all less-educated adult citizens, both U.S.-born and naturalized, 28.7 million were not working in the first quarter of 2011.
• If only one-fourth of the less-educated adult citizens currently not working took a job, it would equal the roughly 7 million illegal immigrants currently estimated to be holding non-farm jobs.
• The above figures do not include the 7.2 million American teenagers (16-17) not working. It also does not include the 17.1 million working-age citizens with some college, but not a bachelor’s degree, who are not working.

Discussion

Rep. Smith’s recently introduced bill (H.R. 2164) would for the first time require all businesses to verify the legal status of workers using the online E-Verify system. The bill seems likely to pass the House, and has already been endorsed by key business associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Federation of Independent Business. Those who oppose the bill argue there are not enough American workers available to fill the estimated 8 million jobs held by illegal immigrants, 90 percent of which are non-agricultural. In a recent blog for The Hill newspaper, Rep. Smith argued that a very large number of potential workers are available and that passing H.R. 2164 would be helpful in putting some of them back to work.

Smith’s views stand in stark contrast to President Obama’s views on the issue, which were most recently outlined in his May 10th speech in El Paso. In that speech the president argued that because the border was more secure, it is now time to legalize illegal immigrants and to increase the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country. The president stated that amnesty and more legal immigration are needed for both humanitarian and economic reasons. The president seems to assume that jobs are plentiful.

The findings of this analysis indicate that the employment situation for the less-educated Americans, who are the most likely to compete with illegal immigrants, is bleak. An enormous number of less-educated workers are current looking for work and cannot find it and many more have given up looking for a job altogether.

Data and Methods

The data for all the Tables in this study come from the public-use files of the January, February, and March 2011 Current Population Surveys (CPS), which are collected monthly by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Each CPS includes about 131,000 respondents. The government publishes employment statistics that are both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted from the survey. The figures in this analysis are seasonally unadjusted because they are computationally simpler and easy for other researchers to replicate. Seasonal adjustment impacts the data only slightly. In general, BLS does not provide separate estimates for the foreign-born (immigrants) and the native-born broken down by characteristics like education, race, and age. However, all CPS respondents are asked these questions. The Census Bureau defines the foreign-born as persons who are not U.S. citizens at birth, which includes naturalized citizens, legal immigrants who are not citizens (green! card holders), temporary visitors and workers, and illegal immigrants.

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent non-partisan research institution that examines the impact of immigration on the United States.

The program quickly confirms 99.5% of work-eligible employees. Even though E-Verify is not mandatory, many employers willingly use the program. More than 250,000 American employers currently use it, and an average of 1,300 new businesses sign up each week.

Immigration: E-Verify helps employers weed out illegal hires – latimes.com

The primary complaint from the business community, as exemplified by the comments of my friend from the Gwinnett Chamber, is that the E-Verify requirement will place an unreasonable burden on Georgia businesses as they struggle to emerge from the recession:

“We’re coming out of [a] recession, and businesses are doing all they can do right now to stay afloat,” said Jann Moore, senior director of public policy and education for the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce. “To turn around and put the responsibility of another policy on business is the wrong thing to do. The timing could not be worse.”

In truth, the fears are completely unjustified. First, the compromise reached on Thursday exempts smaller businesses for which, arguably, E-Verify would cause the greatest burden. As I will explain in a minute, even the smallest businesses can comply with the law with minimal hassle.

Second, businesses of any size can reduce the actual cost of compliance to a couple of minutes and less than $6 per new hire, a far cry from the $127 per new employee claimed by the business lobbyists.

In 2007, I founded Verify I-9 LLC, which is a Designated Agent of the E-Verify program. In short, we conduct verifications for our business clients. We have hundreds of clients from many states including Georgia.

Our average client employs fewer than four workers and hire no more than one or two new employees a year. But even for our larger clients, participation in E-Verify is essentially hassle-free.

Verify I-9 currently charges no setup fee and no monthly fee; in other words, it costs nothing to enroll in E-Verify. By using a Designated Agent (aka Employer Agent), the employer avoids the tutorials and mastery tests that are required before access to the system is granted. By hiring us, the employer saves three to six hours of labor cost on the front end.

E-Verify adds just a couple of minutes to the hiring process—the time that it takes to drop the I-9 form into a fax machine. We submit the information from the I-9 to E-Verify and return the response by email, usually within one business day. The employer writes a verification number on the I-9 form and files it away.

It really is as simple as that.

Our charge for this service is currently as low as $5.95, and no more than $9.90 per new hire. Employers that enroll directly can use the system for free.

Over 400,000 businesses are enrolled in E-Verify with over 1,000 new enrollees each week. Hundreds of Georgia businesses participate including Gwinnett-based E.R. Snell Construction, Cash Register & POS Systems Support, Next Step Electrical Services, Surig & Son Specialized Masonry, Drywall & Acoustic Contractors and Phillip Blount & Associates.

When you hear the business community, liberal politicians and pro-amnesty advocates foretelling the demise of Georgia’s economy, know that the complaints are unfounded and amount to nothing more than posturing to preserve the status quo.

What do you think? Do you support Georgia’s new E-Verify requirement? Would you be more likely to patronize a business that checks its new hires? Tell me what you think in the comments.

Georgia lawmakers pass illegal immigration crackdown  | ajc.com

Then why are you spending money to protect illegal aliens and the employers who hire them?

The Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act went into effect in 2007. It required that all local governments use the E-Verify system to make sure that they were not hiring illegal workers and to use the federal SAVE system to verify that applicants for various public benefits including business licenses were eligible to receive them.

The law also mandated that employers providing products and services to the government– construction companies, landscape services, road builders, etc.– enroll in E-Verify to ensure that tax dollars are not paid to illegal workers.

Numerous groups lobbied against the law’s passage including the ACLU and GALEO, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials. Two of the most influential lobbyists, the GMA and the ACCG, were able to weaken the bill to the point that there were no penalties for violations. Those groups have opposed every effort to strengthen the laws regulating the employers of illegal aliens including this session’s Senate Bill 3.

Who are the GMA and ACCG? Just two of the most powerful lobbying groups at the State Capitol; the lobbyists that you are funding to oppose tougher sanctions on governments and employers who violate Georgia’s immigration-related laws.

Most Georgia cities belong to the Georgia Municipal Association, an umbrella group that provides “tools and services” to aid local governments. Your county is a member of a comparable group with a similar purpose, the Association County Commissioners of Georgia. Both groups have a team of lobbyists pestering State Reps and Senators under the Gold Dome to amend and pass laws that benefit them or, at best, don’t restrict them too much.

The member cities and counties pay annual dues to the organizations; tens of thousands of dollars from each to fund the organizations’ activities. That money comes from you, the taxpayer, “the usual victims in illegal immigration” says D.A. King, the president of the Dustin Inman Society.

King asks, “Why does a bill designed to protect legal workers on public works contract have a thumbs down from GMA Inc.? Why did it take a 2006 Georgia law to make Georgia’s 535 municipalities begin using E-Verify? Why isn’t GMA/ACCG leading the way in protecting the American worker? Why aren’t all 535 municipalities and 159 counties still not using the federal SAVE program as required by the 2006 state law?”

Good questions… questions that you should be asking your City Council and your County Commission. While you’re at it, ask them why you are paying to fund a political effort that is diametrically opposed to your own position on illegal immigration.

The article also serves to highlight the need for a more comprehensive local immigration enforcement plan. Every offender detained under 287-g constitutes an unjustified burden on Gwinnett taxpayers, even if they only spend a couple of nights in jail before being deported.

A better approach would be to adopt a local version of the three-year-old Arizona law that requires businesses to enroll in the free, federal E-Verify program to qualify for a business license. If Gwinnett’s leaders eliminate the primary reason for illegal immigrants to live in Gwinnett—jobs—they minimize the impact of illegal aliens and their families on publicly-funded services including the jail.

Still, according to The Times’ analysis, 200,000 illegal immigrants in Georgia are driving to work daily. For them, the new laws mean any police stop, whether for a violation that caused an accident, or for a broken taillight or another driver’s mistake, can lead to deportation. Since 2006, thousands of immigrants, mostly from Latin America, have been deported from Georgia after traffic violations, often shaking up long-settled families.

Illegal immigrants who drive risk more than a ticket – Hawaii News – Staradvertiser.com