-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
While Republicans have been trying to leech the credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Obama has upstaged them by laying out his immigration reform plan. This is a signature political issue that the Republicans have tried to make their own. However, the E-Verify program will test whether they really want to solve the problem or whether, like bin Laden, they’re more interested in maintaining the issue for its political usefulness.
The E-Verify system looks for a match between the name and SSN of the worker who applies for a job. If there’s a mismatch then the worker may be undocumented, or the worker has to contact the SSA to get the records corrected. The E-Verify program, if widely implemented, would dramatically reduce the incentive for illegal entry.
However, business hates it. The Florida Chamber of Congress has succeeded in getting mandatory E-Verify removed from a Florida immigration reform bill. Republicans are caught between their business overlords and the Tea Party.
The Florida Chamber of Congress cites out-of-date error rates and concerns over identity theft as the basis for their objection to mandatory E-Verify. Could it be there’s another reason? Maybe it’s because businesses can take advantage of the illegal’s vulnerability and pay them less than the minimum wage and violate work safety rules, as pointed out in Obama’s recent speech.
The error rates for E-Verify are steadily improving with most errors occurring due to typos and changes in names or citizenship that are not reported to the Social Security system. Workers need to get these errors fixed in order to receive their full Social Security benefits to which they are entitled.
The problem with identity theft occurs when an undocumented worker uses someone else’s (matching) name and SSN when applying for a job. That problem has been solved by something called “E-Verify Self Check” where individuals can access their status before applying for a job. The system knows whom you’ve worked for over the years and can ask the kind of questions that only the legitimate worker would be able to answer correctly. Therefore, workers can be verified and identity thieves won’t be able to verify their data.
Another problem for E-Verify is the case of Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting that is before the Supreme Court (Kagan, J., recused). At issue is a 2006 Arizona statute, the Legal Arizona Workers Act that requires all employers to participate in the E-Verify program, which is preempted by a federal law that specifically makes that system voluntary. The law was signed by then-governor of Arizona Janet Napolitano, now the Secretary of Homeland Security, the department that runs E-Verify. What you have is the Obama administration’s Solicitor General arguing against the most effective tool in the administration’s arsenal against illegal immigration.
As pointed out by Justice Ginsburg during oral arguments:
How can Arizona take a Federal resource, which the Federal Government says is voluntary except in certain circumstances, and turn it into something that’s mandatory?
The E-Verify Modernization Act of 2011 seeks to make E-Verify permanent and mandatory. It will be interesting to see if the bill suffers the same fate as the Florida legislation.
H/T: VC, Miami Herald, Adam Serwer, Daily Finance.
Tony, whatever the ad campaigns for the Joplin area Congressional district say, it is going to get ugly. Bill Long has bitten off a very large chew and he can neither spit it out or swallow it.
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving fellow. 😈
“Plus you cannot point at a single regulation that prevents any company from fixing something that endangers the public.”
Yep.
But it’s so hard to make a profit doing that, Tony! Sheesh! Haven’t you been paying attention! 😉
@Roco: If you all would lower taxes and get rid of some regulations to free up business, maybe we could afford to fix this stuff.
Oh, I see, you are only endangering lives and killing children because your taxes are too high!
Plus you cannot point at a single regulation that prevents any company from fixing something that endangers the public.
BTW, business taxes are at the lowest they’ve been in 60 years. Shouldn’t we be expecting them to step up to the plate and start fixing whatever they own?
OS,
That’s a funny story about Greenspan. Existential angst falls prey to egotism. Odd that all that “I” blinded him.
OS – In the real world you and I can’t lend money we don’t have.
Central banking, government money printing and fractional reserve lending are all creations of government. The free market has nothing to do with it.
OS,
The flaw in the model is that greed took over and wall street got even richer.
On Alan Greenspan and objectivism:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/05/23/alan-greenspan-had-to-be-convinced-that-he-existed-before-meeting-ayn-rand/
@OS: I would agree except I could not endorse using actual victim shots.
There is no need, most campaigns are full of volunteer actors willing to fill a few pews, or dress in suits and stand in a cemetery.
I like this tag line: “Bill Long promises he’ll cut spending. No matter what it costs you.”
How’s the winning converts over to objectivism and the Austrian school of economics working out for ya’ there, “Roco”?
Doesn’t look like you’re getting any takers other than ones who came in already dancing to the same piper as you.
I’m so . . . not surprised.
i trust the dot to do the inspections more than the people building the road.
i’m guessing you believe that with no inspectors or regulations everything would run smoothly?
my mothers family in alabama have owned land there for four generations. they’re about 20mi from the nearest town yet they now have to run city water lines to the area because chicken producers have tainted the groundwater.
want to guess who had to pay to run the lines?
i like clean water regulations. i like clean water.
when i get on an aircraft i want to know that the maintenance was done properly and on time.
and yes i trust the government to regulate it more than i trust the business that’s providing the goods or service.
the government inspector isn’t concerned with the businesses quarterly earnings
Yep. What Blouise said.
What Blouise said!
Roco
1, May 23, 2011 at 10:15 pm
And where is all of this money going to come from?
If you all would lower taxes and get rid of some regulations to free up business, maybe we could afford to fix this stuff.
=====================================
We could steal some of it back from the Afghans … and we could rescind the welfare tax breaks on the oil industry … and we could tax the putridly ripe wealthy … and we could fine the hell out of Wall Street … and we could cut the salary of all members of the U. S. House and Senate … and we could scam the Chamber of Commerce out of some of their foreign cash … and … geez, we’d be rich!
roco, if you and your cronies have their way, the money will not come from anywhere. Taxes are already so low that inspections are not taking place; the collapse of the Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis is an example of that. The country will continue to decline until we look like a third world country, while the rest of the industrialized world passes us economically, socially and in terms of life expectancy.
As for the I-35 bridge, “…Since 1993, the bridge was inspected annually by Mn/DOT, although no inspection report was completed in 2007, due to the construction work. In the years prior to the collapse, several reports cited problems with the bridge structure. In 1990, the federal government gave the I-35W bridge a rating of “structurally deficient,” citing significant corrosion in its bearings. Approximately 75,000 other U.S. bridges had this classification in 2007.”
They knew the bridge was dangerously deficient, but it would have COST MONEY to fix. It was much more important for the Koch crime family to get more tax cuts than to fix it.
OS,
My bad!:)
“i’ve heard the florida DOT has a plan in the works to let the road builders do their own inspections.”
And you trust government to do the right thing?
Is it do their own inspections or pay for their inspections which would be monitored by the state.
And where is all of this money going to come from?
If you all would lower taxes and get rid of some regulations to free up business, maybe we could afford to fix this stuff.
OT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html?hp
Justices, 5-4, Tell California to Cut Prisoner Population
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Overcrowding, long a problem, in a gym used as a dormitory at a prison in Chino, Calif., in 2007.
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: May 23, 2011
WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.”
Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents. Justice Scalia called the order affirmed by the majority “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito said “the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California.”
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
… and the article continues
On Monday, he went the other way. This was in some ways unsurprising: in his opinions and in speeches, Justice Kennedy has long been critical of what he views as excessively long and harsh sentences.
“A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society,” Justice Kennedy wrote on Monday. (end of excerpt)
the invisible hand of the free market will
no, no wait, when you cut taxes it raises rendezvous
yeah
i’ve heard the florida DOT has a plan in the works to let the road builders do their own inspections.
OOPS, bad fingers. raff!