E-Verify is happening! Why it's a win for workers

Florida is leading the way! The Florida Senate passed S.B. 1718 mandating E-Verify last Tuesday. There are so many of you to thank for sending your action alerts and making calls! We advocate here, but you make it happen where you are each time you send your alerts to state and national representatives. THANK YOU!!

Next up is H.R. 2 which we need your help to pass through the U.S. House! Both the Florida Senate and U.S. House bills include tougher E-Verify mandates. Let's not miss the opportunity to put our representatives on the record.

Why it matters so much

E-Verify, mandated and enforced, will significantly addressemployer accountability,combat wage suppression,protect disenfranchised American citizens, the real missing workforce, anddiscourage much of the illegal migration at the southern border.

"All refugees are migrants, but not every migrant is a refugee."

Former Director, International Organization for Migration--William Swing

NumbersUSA CEO James Massa's tour of the U.S. Mexico border with

Dir. of The Center for Immigration Studies Mike Krikorian, April 2023

Rising wages with less immigration? Blasphemy!

A few "blasphemer" perspectives:

In his latest book, author and professor Michael Lind makes it clear that one of several key causes for decades of wage depression in America is "government immigration policies that expand low-wage legal immigration or fail to enforce sanctions against hiring illegal immigrants."

"Evading and destroying American organized labor was one of the motives, if not the major motive, of the business lobbies that pressured the federal government to rewrite U.S. trade and immigration laws to facilitate both mass offshoring and mass immigration." Michael Lind, Penguin Random House, 2023

Zachary Karabell, in an interview with John Wood Jr. recently questioned the negative characterization by the Fed & many economists that rising wages and a tight labor market following the pandemic shutdown should be framed as anything other than to say "this is a good thing."

E-Verify will aid in forcing a reset in the American mindset where rising wages and a better balance between labor and business is something to be championed, not suppressed.

AND it will serve those Americans most affected by unfair and unlawful labor practices:

March 9, 2023

Hiring American workers first and paying fair market wages will return the focus appropriately to market demand for the best quality in goods and services, not the surplus supply of a cheaply paid foreign workforce.

Oren Cass of American Compass:

Profit-maximizing employers will only offer the wages and conditions necessary to retain the workers they need. Both employers and pro-business economists see cheap labor as vital to economic growth and so are quick to declare a "labor shortage" at the first sign of typical workers receiving real wage increases.

This helps explain why real wages have risen by 1% over the past 50 years, while productivity rose by 141% and corporate profits per capita by 185%...Several tools exist for this purpose,...But the most potent tool is immigration. Immigrants have accounted for more than half the growth in America's labor force over the past 15 years and their presence is most pronounced in the lowest-wage occupations. Illegal immigrants are often missing from that data and tend to be even further concentrated in those occupations. Rather than lament all the "jobs Americans won't do," which exist only because the law provides non-Americans to do them, policymakers should leave employers no choice but to create jobs Americans will do.

Yes! Cass is correct. Americans will do the jobs if conditions change!

E-Verify will pave the way for Americans to get back to work once pay is better and employers can no longer as easily get away with offering the working conditions similar or worse than Waffle House that an illegal worker would accept.

Speaking of the issue of change, Batya Ungar Sargon echoes voices of the past on Biden's continuation of the Trump era-enforced trade rule 232, with Biden thumbing his nose at the World Trade Organization. NumbersUSA takes no position on trade tariffs except to ask the obvious question in this particular instance: Why won't Biden tell the United Nations where to shove it too when it dictates to the U.S. what we should do about mass immigration into our country?!

And last but not least, E-Verify will make our communities safer so these two examples of tragic madness, stop:

Child Labor is Back in Vogue

Joe Guzzardi, April 26, 2023

AND...

Thank you for sending your action alerts.

Let's get E-Verify passed.

If together we stand, then together we can.

In solidarity with you, our valued members, friends, and partners,