https://www.city-journal.org/e-verify-illegal-immigration
Donald Trump was elected president because a large segment of the American public was fed up with the government’s failure to stop mass illegal immigration. Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. drew an ecstatic response from his supporters, long scorned for their belief that the decision regarding who enters the country belongs to Americans, not to foreign nationals living outside the country. But the wall has not been built, and the fight over its funding has sucked political capital from the pursuit of other, and arguably better, means to deter illegal immigrants.
The most important of those measures is to prevent unauthorized aliens from getting work, since the jobs magnet is the primary lure for illegal immigration. Commentators and analysts across the political spectrum have acknowledged that preventing illegal employment is key to deterring illegal immigration. The New York Times editorialized in 1982 that “there can be no effective enforcement of the borders” without mandatory verification of a worker’s papers. A technology has existed for decades to do just that. E-Verify, run by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, allows employers to check—instantaneously and for free—whether the work documents presented by a potential employee correspond to an existing Social Security number or whether they are forged. Universal implementation of E-Verify has been blocked, however, by employers who prefer to hire illegal aliens over American workers.
Trump invoked E-Verify during the 2016 campaign but has since stopped publicly promoting it. Yet E-Verify is more popular with the public than the wall; at least two-thirds of poll respondents support mandatory verification of a worker’s lawful status. States that require it (Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah) have changed worker behavior. Illegal aliens dropped off the payrolls in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, prompting employers to hire legal workers, according to a 2013 study conducted by Bloomberg Government. A 2017 study by Carnegie Mellon University found that Arizona’s E-Verify law induced return migration from Arizona to Mexico and decreased illegal immigration into Arizona from Mexico. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the population of less educated young Mexican and Central American immigrants dropped in states with mandatory E-Verify, in part because they moved to states without the mandate and in part because they returned to their home countries. Wages for low-skilled American and legal-immigrant workers in mandatory E-Verify states rose between 7 percent and 9 percent, while wages for illegal Mexican males dropped nearly 8 percent.