This week’s passage of Lamar Smith’s mandatory E-Verify bill by the House Immigration Subcommittee has focused attention on the costs of the program to both business and government. A Bloomberg research report calculated that mandating the program would cost small businesses 2.6 billion dollars per year. Federal government costs would approach one billion dollars...
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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Republican effort to make hiring tougher by mandating E-Verify nationally is meeting a lot of resistance from the conservative base: Conservative, tea-party and libertarian groups have joined liberals in fighting a signature Republican bill in Congress that would crack down on illegal-immigrant workers. The legislation, they argue,...
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Huffington Post reports that questions about mandatory E-Verify are being raised within the Republican Party. At the mark-up of the bill in the House Immigration Subcommittee yesterday Rep. Dan Lungren, a California Republican,  said “I just can’t abide with what we’re doing to my state in terms of the temporary need for temporary workers....
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Scores of people from Long Island and New York City rallied outside the Massapequa Park offices of Peter King this afternoon to protest Republican plans to make E-Verify mandatory. E-Verify imposes a new level of bureaucracy on businesses hiring new employees. Before a company can put someone to work, it will have to verify...
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Lamar Smith is proposing a new “braceros” to bring migrant farmworkers to the United States for short periods to tend and harvest crops. Smith, head of the House Judiciary Committee, is an important opponent of any immigration reform that would improve the legal status of the undocumented immigrants who make up 60% to 70%...
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When Congress gets back to business in September, Representative Lamar Smith is expected to push new legislation making E-Verify mandatory. This would require employers to check all new hires against a database of people eligible to work. While E-Verify has been shown to have a high error rate, ruling many people ineligible to work...
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Over the last six years the Republicans have made employers one of the whipping boys of the immigration debate. In proposal after proposal, at the state and federal level, new anti-immigrant bills have targeted employers with heavy fines and criminal penalties for hiring undocumented workers and burdensome paperwork requirements mandate employment authorization verification. Since...
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