House immigration status-check bill faces tough road
WASHINGTON -- The House Judiciary Committee this week passed a Republican-sponsored bill that would require private businesses to use a federal program that checks the immigration status of all job applicants.
But the bill, the most sweeping piece of immigration legislation moving through Congress, will have a hard time getting through the full House, let alone passing the Democrat-controlled Senate and getting a signature from President Obama.
The bill passed the committee 22-13 on a party-line vote, with no Democrats voting in favor.
At a time when House Republicans are pushing a job-creating, regulation-slashing agenda, Democrats say the immigration verification program, called E-Verify, will cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their jobs, and impose another, expensive layer of regulation on struggling U.S. businesses.
"Solutions should not be worse than the problems they purport to solve," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.
Even some Republicans worry about the impact a nationwide E-Verify program would have on the economy. Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., a member of the Judiciary committee, said the agricultural industry would lose thousands of workers that couldn't be replaced without an accompanying guest-worker program that would allow foreign nationals to work American fields.
"I'm absolutely convinced that without a fix for agriculture, (E-Verify) will not get to the House floor," Lungren said.
A Bloomberg Government report found that small businesses would have to spend $2.6 billion a year to use the program. E-Verify is free to use, but the report found that businesses would have to train human resources officers, purchase computers and Internet access and hire personnel to oversee the screenings.
When discussing an earlier version of the bill in 2005, House Speaker John Boehner told the Republican National Hispanic Assembly that the nationwide expansion of the program was "well-intentioned, but fatally flawed" and said employers should not be "burdened with another cumbersome federal mandate."
A Boehner spokesman said any decision to bring the E-Verify bill to the House floor would be up to Majority Leader Eric Cantor and refused to comment further. Cantor's office also declined to comment.
Legal workers could also be hurt by the bill, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, which opposes the law. The report found that the program's error rate of 0.5% would mean that 770,000 legal workers would be flagged as having immigration problems, possibly losing their jobs as they try to correct their records.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said critics are wrongly calling E-Verify a jobs-killer when it should be viewed as a job creator for legal Americans.
Smith, who sponsored the E-Verify bill and is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, points out that the U.S. government, businesses that contract with the federal government and 18 states governments require job applicants to undergo an E-Verify check. Another 300,000 private businesses are voluntarily using the program, with another 1,000 businesses signing on every week.
He described E-Verify as the best way to weed out some of the roughly 7 million illegal immigrants working in the USA so that some of the 23 million unemployed Americans can step in.
"Why would anyone oppose legislation that helps businesses follow the law and help American workers get jobs?" Smith said.
"It's a jobs bill, (House leadership) is supporting jobs bills, so I would expect their support."
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