MICHAEL W. CUTLER:E-VERIFY CAN HELP POTENTIAL EMPLOYERS
E-Verify can help potential employers By Michael W. Cutler
April 23, 2011
Our nation’s continuing failures to secure its borders and create an immigration system that deters illegal immigration encourages illegal aliens to enter our country in violation of law with the expectation that they will get a job today and will ultimately be rewarded with a “pathway to U.S. Citizenship” under the aegis of “comprehensive immigration reform.” This undermines national security and endangers community safety. This also hammers the economy, the environment, health care and education.
Our nation’s immigration laws are utterly blind as to race, religion or ethnicity and only distinguish whether a person is a citizen or an alien. The purpose of our immigration laws is to prevent the entry of aliens into our country whose presence would be harmful or even dangerous to our citizens and our nation, an issue of particular concern in this perilous era.
We have all but forfeited our expectations of freedom and privacy under the Fourth Amendment in the name of “national security,” yet our borders remain as porous as a sieve and we have unknown millions of illegal aliens in our country whose true identities, backgrounds and intentions are unknown and unknowable.
The part of the system that is broken is the extreme lack of resources and political will to actually enforce these important laws and secure our borders. This is especially incomprehensible, given the ongoing threats posed by terrorists and violent transnational drug trafficking organizations that have infiltrated cities throughout the United States. Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano has often stated that more than 230 cities across our nation are now infested by members of the extraordinarily violent Mexican drug cartels.
Greedy business owners often say that illegal aliens will do the work Americans won’t do. In point of fact, there is no job an American won’t do for a living wage. Vulnerable illegal aliens work for substandard wages under substandard conditions.
Annually, foreign workers send well over $100 billion of their ill-gotten wages back to their home countries. This is money that is not earned by U.S. citizens or resident aliens, money that is not spent or invested in America. Meanwhile it is estimated that at least one-fifth of all American families, of all ethnicities, now live below the poverty line.
E-Verify is extremely accurate and very user friendly. It can help employers to avoid hiring illegal aliens and it provides safe harbor provisions for employers who use it.
We all have a stake in the security of our nation that secure borders and the effective enforcement of the immigration laws can provide.
Michael W. Cutler is a retired senior special agent with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service.
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