Is Congress Serious about Jobs?

Common Sense and Justice Mandate E-Verify Now

Mike Scruggs

Part 2 of a Series on Immigration

The U.S Senate rightly killed the latest Obama-Reid jobs bill, which would have wasted another $447 billion on corporate boondoggles and government projects that would have created few jobs outside the circle of Democratic Party political corruption. It would have been another testimony that Keynesian-Socialist economics does not work no matter how many times you polish it with shiny new demagoguery and deception. In fact, the bill’s new taxes “on the rich” would probably have deterred business investments and entrepreneurial innovation and killed hundreds of thousands of potential new jobs. Marxist class-warfare rhetoric and still more sure-failure economic plans do not encourage business investment. The only thing they increase is government corruption and public cynicism and desperation.

Several generations ago, the Democratic Party advocated limited, Constitutional government, economic freedom, low taxes, and free trade. But how they have changed! I have long given up any hope that more than a small remnant of Democrats in Congress understands Economics 101. They have become enslaved to monstrous social and

economic error and addicted to shallow emotional rhetoric that sways uninformed and unwary voters but keeps those same voters shackled to a bleak future of limited freedom and government dependence. Moreover, under President Obama’s radical left-wing social and economic delusions, the Democrats are moving our country to the brink of social and economic implosion.

Our economic misery is the highest it has been since the Great Depression, and we are not far from stepping off into an abyss of economic decline and stagflation—threatened by both hopeless unemployment and escalating inflation. The first is driven by astonishingly misguided economic policies and the second by excessive government spending.

But is Congress serious about jobs—American jobs? The Bureau of Labor’s official U-3 unemployment rate is deceptively understated at 9.1 percent. Officially, nearly 14 million Americans are unemployed, but the staggering reality of the full scope of jobless desperation is far worse .The Department of Labor’s 16.5 percent U-6 unemployment rate indicates that 25 million Americans want a full-time job and cannot find one. Yet there are over 8 million illegal immigrants holding jobs in the United States. It is unconscionable hypocrisy to talk about jobs and not directly address our immigration problems.

Yet we have a fairly easy solution that would drastically reduce the number of illegal immigrants employed by U.S. businesses and put millions of Americans into badly needed jobs. It is called “E-Verify.”

E-Verify stands for Employee Verification. Some call it Workplace Verification. It allows employers to use the Department of Homeland Security’s Electronic Employment Verification Program, with its 60 million records, to quickly and easily verify the immigration status and work authorization for new employees.

Many employers use E-verify voluntarily. Georgia and several other states now require it. It is not a perfect system, but it is thus far proving highly effective in reducing the illegal immigrant population. One present imperfection is that employers are not allowed to use it with prospective employees but only with new hires and existing employees. Hopefully, this politically correct over-attention to the civil rights of illegal aliens can be eliminated in the future. Nonetheless, the program is working well in reducing illegal immigrants in the workforce.

The tough new immigration laws of Georgia and Alabama are causing significant self-deportation of illegal immigrants. There are many complaints by employers who use cheap foreign labor, but it is opening up jobs for Americans and legal immigrants, particularly the poor and young. Nationally, nearly 40 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 with only a high school education are unemployed. Approximately 43 percent of Hispanic Americans and 50 percent of black Americans in that group are unemployed.

Mandatory Federal E-Verify would require compliance by all employers and states. But California has passed a law forbidding use of E-Verify despite the fact that illegal immigration is destroying the fiscal integrity of the state. California has a $20 billion state budget deficit and a 12 percent unemployment rate (U-3). Illegal immigrants are costing California taxpayers $10.5 billion per year. Should federal taxpayers in other states be forced to bail out California’s irresponsible government? We may soon be facing that question.

Texas job growth topped the nation in the last decade. But a recent Center for Immigration Studies analysis of Texas job growth revealed some embarrassing truth.

Of the 279,000 jobs created in Texas since 2007, nearly 81 percent went to recent foreign immigrants. Nearly half of these—40 percent—went to illegal immigrants. Yet the native-born accounted for 69 percent of the increase in the working age population. Native-born participation in the workforce dropped from 71 percent to 67 percent.

Failure to enforce our immigration laws at the workplace is clearly hurting native-born workers. There are five House bills in the legislative pipeline that would mandate E-Verify, two of them sponsored by Democrats. To check legislative details and the positions of Republican Presidential hopefuls check numbersusa.com. NumbersUSA gives the strongest ratings for E-Verify support among Presidential hopefuls to Gingrich,

Bachmann, Romney, and Cain.

Passing Mandatory E-Verify would put more Americans back to work quicker than almost anything Congress could do.

There are some Republican House leaders, however, who want to delay E-Verify until 2012. I think this would be a serious political mistake. Congress should get serious about jobs.