The Arizona Republic and the Associated Press (AP) used Cato’s recent work to highlight the failure of E‑Verify to turn off the jobs magnet that attracts unauthorized immigrants to the United States. Arizona has a shaky record on immigration enforcement, despite its laws and reputation to the contrary. Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has had zero E‑Verify related cases since 2010 and the state Attorney General’s office has failed to update a list of E‑Verify compliant businesses since at least 2012 – a requirement under state law.

Other states’ recent experiences also point to problems with E‑Verify.

In Ohio, an unauthorized worker at a dairy company was charged on October 20^th with identity fraud, after having been discovered to be using the Social Security number of a (legal) Arizona resident. The fraud only came to light after the Arizonan discovered that his Social Security number was being used in Ohio. The fraud was not discovered by the routine E‑Verify check that the unauthorized Ohio worker underwent in 2013. E‑Verify confirmed the worker, who was utilizing the stolen SSN and fraudulently obtained documents based off of said number, as work-authorized and legal. The use of a valid number and fraudulent (but on the surface valid) documents by migrants is a problem with E‑Verify that we’ve highlighted in the past.

California passed legislation to prevent employer misuse of E‑Verify. Their law effectively duplicates federal restrictions on re-verification of employees, bars selective verification (targeting certain applicants over others), punishes use of E‑Verify as an interview screening tool, and imposes a $10,000 fine for misuse. The intent of the new law is positive but it will be impossible to enforce.

Finally, a controversial immigration bill has become law in North Carolina (I wrote about this in May). The new law lowers the threshold for mandated E‑Verify to businesses with five or more employees, limits the types of identification that migrants can present (effectively banning use of Mexican consular identification cards), and prevents local and county governments from adopting so-called “sanctuary city” policies.

E‑Verify imposes an economic cost on American workers and employers, does little to halt unlawful immigration because it fails to turn off the “jobs magnet,” and is an expansionary threat to American liberties. During the housing collapse and Great Recession, Arizona enacted the Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA), which mandated E‑Verify for all new hires in the states. In its early days, E‑Verify had a reputation of effectiveness that, combined with the crashing economy, resulted in a large exodus of unlawful immigrants from Arizona. After the economic recovery and E‑Verify’s flaws were made clear, subsequent states like Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina have had far less success in using E‑Verify to decrease the numbers of unauthorized immigrants in their states. E‑Verify’s bark was worse than its bite.

This post was written with the help of Scott Platton