Democrats, Republicans and independents seeking a unifying issue across America’s fractured electoral landscape need look no further than E-Verify.
The federal government’s online system that screens job applicants’ eligibility to legally work in this country enjoys overwhelming support with voters.
Respondents to a post-election poll showed 73.6 percent favor mandatory use of E-Verify. Just 8.6 percent oppose it.
Support for E-Verify cuts across all party and ethnic/racial lines. It is backed by 54.6 backed of Democrats, 90.5 percent of Republicans and 78.4 percent of independents. It is supported by 80.2 percent of white voters, 58.4 percent of Hispanic voters, 52.7 percent of black voters and 73.8 percent of Asian voters.
That level of consensus is hard to find anywhere, on anything. Heck, there’s more division on whether professional athletes should stand for the National Anthem.
The national exit poll, conducted by Zogby Analytics on behalf of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, exposes the dysfunctional disconnect between the public’s commonsense wishes and the (in)action of their elected representatives in Washington.
Twenty states require all or nearly all private-sector employers to use E-Verify. As of Dec. 31, 2017, 2.4 million hiring sites were enrolled in the program. Deep blue California had the most sites: 216,850.
Yet Congress — beholden to special interests that prey on cheap, illegal labor — remains gridlocked.
FAIR President Dan Stein calls mandatory E-Verify “low-hanging fruit” for President Donald Trump in the coming two years.
“The 2018 elections were clearly not a repudiation of the president’s stances on immigration policy and enforcement. To the contrary, these policies enjoy broad support and likely helped minimize his party’s losses in the midterms,” Stein said.
Indeed, the Zogby survey found 88.3 percent of voters — including 82.8 percent of Democrats and 85.7 percent of independents — believe illegal immigration is “a problem” or a “serious problem.”
E-Verify goes to the root of the problem in the workplace. As long as U.S. employers are free to hire illegal aliens, the job magnet will keep attracting border-busting migrants, and Americans’ paychecks will continue to be undercut.
For wages to go up, illegal immigration must go down. Americans know that; it’s high time politicians in Washington started working for their constituents and the national interest by making E-Verify the law of the land.
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Step One
Get our own American Social Security Agency, Credit Bureaus and Banks on E-Verify First
The rest will be easy after that.
When are blacks going to learn that they are the biggest victims of mass legal and illegal immigration. The Democratic party is playing them for suckers, taking their votes for granted, while it’s Donald Trump’s policies of stopping illegal immigration and cutting back on chain migration of low educated family members that will do the most to raise wages for blacks.
For whatever reasons you want to provide, blacks have less formal education than whites as far as college degrees and that means they are not going to get higher paying jobs. The one and only way to make employers pay higher wages for unskilled and semi-skilled jobs is to shrink the labor pool and make those employers compete for workers. This is not exactly rocket science. Adam Smith literally wrote the book on supply and demand 2 and a half centuries ago and it is still a fact today.
Nor is it true that we need “more workers” as a lot of Wall Street flacks insist. The opposite is true. We see it already, self serve kiosks and cashiers at many stores and fast food restaurants. A 10-19-2018 msn.com story stated this about agricultural workers in California: “Large harvesters that cost $450,000 spit out 26 tons of tomatoes every 15 to 20 minutes. In a pistachio orchard, machines throttle tree trunks sending nuts raining down.” Those machines have replaced a lot of workers.