On the first Friday of each month, Americans eyeball the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation report, notably its headline item—new payroll jobs filled. The reports over the last year reveal that our economy has continued to grow smartly despite a variety of headwinds, with private payrolls adding 3.5 million jobs. Heading into an election year, politicians in Washington are naturally attempting to take credit, but the heady growth reflects the fundamental strength of our competitive market economy more than anything else. It also occurred despite a bevy of bureaucratic regulatory roadblocks that the Federal Government places on every private hiring decision, including the government’s Employment Eligibility Verification or as it’s known—E-Verify.
The system is in place to ostensibly help employers avoid hiring illegal workers, yet it penalizes them if they attempt to proactively do so. If they make a mistake, they are exposed to financial penalties. Yet if they try to avoid that mistake by refusing to hire the applicant or requesting additional verification, they run the risk of violating federal anti-discrimination law. It’s a Catch-22 that places a responsibility on employers that they shouldn’t be required to bear on their own, and it then threatens to penalize them no matter what they do.
There is also the burden of time and resources spent on the I-9 form, a paperwork requirement enforced by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the core element of E-Verify. For every employee hired in the United States, the accuracy of the form and accompanying documentation submitted by the employee must be verified as accurate and genuine and then kept securely stored—along with supporting evidence—as a personnel record by the employer for the duration of the employment relationship.
The form is a federal “information collection” instrument, and under the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction Act (44 USC 3501 et seq.), the DHS must submit an estimate of the time burden and cost imposed by the requirements the form imposes on employees and employers to the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Both employees and employers are responsible for reading and understanding the fifteen pages of instructions that accompany the form; workers must devote time finding and submitting verification documents, and employers spend time learning how to identify valid versus false documents.
The employer is held “liable for any violations in connection with the [I-9]form or the verification process…” and is subject to civil fines for mistakenly accepting incorrect documents. Workers are subject to criminal prosecution for false or inaccurate statements on the I-9 form.
The Department’s most recent estimate is that the form imposes a time burden on over 75 million workers each year. This includes the 3.5 million workers hired to fill the new payroll jobs created over the last year as well as the 72 million workers who were hired during the year because of turnover among existing jobs. The DHS estimates that the aggregate time imposed by the I-9 form burdens these newly hired workers and their employers to the tune of over 38 million hours per year. This is equivalent to over $2.3 billion per year in unnecessary costs to workers and employers.
Immigration enforcement is a policy issue that is best handled by our elected officials. The nation’s employers should not be conscripted by the government to perform policing and recordkeeping duties that should be the responsibility of trained government officials. They should either be relieved of their semi-official duties or given an E-Verify system that works with them as they drive our economic growth.
