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Migration Working Group
part of the Mission & Advocacy Committee
The True Costs of E-Verify
The agricultural community in the Genesee Valley is deeply troubled by newly proposed legislation which mandates the use of the E-Verify system.
E-Verify, an Internet-based system which confirms a person’s employment eligibility based on immigration status, is administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. Mandating E-Verify without legalizing all workers is too costly for both the farm owners who rely on their employees and the workers who depend on the wages they earn.
The bread basket of Genesee Valley—Genesee, Orleans and Wyoming counties—does about $500 million of business annually with labor intensive dairy, fruits and vegetables.
This food economy is endangered by the proposed national enforcement system that threatens to remove its workforce. It is critical that Congress develop a comprehensive policy that promotes job development for Americans and a workable legal immigration system.
According to the Agriculture Coalition, about 75 percent of farm workers are unauthorized, and virtually the entire applicant pool is not authorized to work in the U.S. E-Verify, without true solutions for the agricultural sector, will cause crops to rot, farms to fail, and much of our farm production and many farm-dependent jobs to simply leave the country.
In addition, E-Verify will likely result in discriminatory hiring practices and racial-ethnic profiling. If E-Verify goes national, employers might understandably be hesitant to hire anyone who looks or sounds foreign-born.
A 2008 Government Accountability Office report found significant challenges to implementing E-Verify, primary among them error rates and privacy concerns with use of federal government database information. Employers would shoulder much of the financial burden of implementing E-Verify if it was made mandatory for all businesses in the U.S. Requiring E-Verify across the nation without legalizing the undocumented workforce is projected to result in $17.3 billion in lost revenue over 10 years.
As Congressional leaders have pointed out, E-Verify destroys jobs and has been shown to work barely half the time,” said Steve Ralls, communications director for Immigration Equality, a national immigration rights organization. “It is costly, it impacts job growth and it doesn’t work. Instead, Congress should reform our outdated immigration laws to recognize the incredible contribution immigrant workers make to our economy, and to recognize their families and loved ones under the law, too.
The Migration Working Group, a sub-committee of the Mission and Advocacy Committee of our Presbytery of Genesee Valley, encourages you to take an active interest in this pending legislation. To become a member of this task force, contact Susan Orr.
Submitted by Elder Sarah Noble-Moag (Covington) and Susan Orr, Presbyter for Mission and Education