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Many moderate Democrats think they’ve found a solution: employer-focused immigration enforcement. Most people who immigrate illegally do so hoping to find work and secure a better life. Wouldn’t it be fairer and more humane to punish the employers that create those incentives than the poor migrants who act on them? Without the possibility of employment, many might choose to return to their home countries, and the government wouldn’t need to spend billions to surveil, detain, process, deport, and transport them. A version of this system, called E-Verify, already exists, but participation is optional. Making it mandatory sounds like the kind of commonsense proposal that everyone can agree on. There’s just one catch: It won’t work until everyone comes together to solve all the issues with the immigration system that they don’t agree on.
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Trump’s obvious reluctance to crack down on undocumented labor has left an opening for Democrats to reclaim employer-focused enforcement as their idea. The Arizona senator and possible presidential candidate Ruben Gallego endorsed the idea in an immigration plan unveiled last year, as did the House New Democrat Coalition. But if mandating E-Verify might once have been enough to reverse the tide of illegal immigration, today the problem has grown far too large to contain so easily. Almost three times as many undocumented immigrants live in the United States today as when E-Verify was first passed into law in 1996. As the Trump administration has discovered, it’s hard to threaten or persuade 15 million people to leave the country, especially when most of them have been here more than 10 years and live with citizens or legal residents. Declaring overnight that such a huge share of the population cannot be employed—really, seriously, we mean it this time—would be hugely destabilizing. The informal economy, which already represents about 8 percent of the total economy, would balloon as millions more workers were driven into under-the-table arrangements. The already-robust black market for inexpensive Social Security numbers and fake IDs would explode.
For these reasons, the Democrats proposing employer-focused enforcement all offer the same important caveat: Yes to E-Verify, but only after most of the undocumented people already in the country are given a path to legal status. “Once we have immigration reform,” Gallego told me, “and once we have actually legalized” most undocumented immigrants without a criminal record, then strict enforcement of E-Verify is the natural next step. Last August, the New Democrat Coalition, a caucus of 115 congresspeople, released an immigration plan embodying the same logic. It proposes beefing up border security, creating new visa categories and expanding existing ones, giving Dreamers a path to citizenship, and granting legal status to noncriminal undocumented immigrants who arrived more than five years ago and pay a fine.
Representative Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico, who chaired the committee that came up with the plan, told me that the order matters. “E-Verify has to be a key tool,” Vasquez said, but only “once reform is in place.”
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The post The Immigration Restriction Trump Won’t Try appeared first on American Renaissance.
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