As raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers continue to intensify at workplaces across California, often exploding into confrontations between agents and the public, it’s a pressing question facing most employers, now more than ever.
And there’s one question that everyone seems to know the answer to: How do businesses truly know for certain if their new hires are legal in the eyes of the law? And could they even survive, especially in sectors like leisure and hospitality, construction and farming, without using undocumented workers to staff restaurant kitchens, clean hotel rooms, mow lawns, and harvest fruits and vegetables?
Even President Donald Trump, who in recent weeks has doubled down on ICE raids of businesses — from Home Depot parking lots to car washes — has acknowledged the urgent need for immigrant labor when he called for what turned out to be a temporary halt to an immigration crackdown on farms, hotels and restaurants.
In a recent post on his social media platform, he declared, “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
While the government’s E-Verify system is regarded as an increasingly reliable — although not infallible — way of weeding out undocumented workers, few businesses use it, for a variety of reasons. For one, it’s not federally mandated. And it’s considered by many businesses to be more burdensome, vulnerable to error, and, as some suggest, probably too effective in removing the cheap and plentiful supply of undocumented workers on which the U.S. economy relies.
“Why would employers use it if they know that the workers they are hiring are unauthorized, and the reason they’re hiring them is because there are not enough U.S. workers in the first place,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “In reality, unauthorized people are employed all the time. So E-Verify would defeat that purpose.”
What began in 1997 as a pilot program through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act eventually morphed into E-Verify in 2007.
In California, more than 321,000 business locations were using E-Verify as of March, according to the program website. That amounts to about 18% of employer establishments in the state, based on calculations using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A public records request seeking information on E-Verify participation in San Diego County was filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but a response was not received in time for this story.
While E-Verify may be considered the gold standard by the federal government for properly authenticating new hires, employers still have multiple options for accurately confirming on their own the legal status of their workers, say human resources experts. Whatever system an employer embraces, though, it cannot address the reality of a narrowing labor pool of legal residents, analysts counter.
“Our economy is dependent on immigrant workers. And since we don’t have an immigration system that would allow people to eat legally, we then become reliant on unauthorized workers.”
The current dependence on immigrant workers has evolved over decades, against a backdrop of steadily falling U.S. birth rates, an aging workforce, limited pathways to legal residency, and the reality that certain low-paying jobs simply hold little appeal for U.S.-born workers.
“Even if you raise the wages of picking tomatoes in our farms by 100%, we still would not have U.S. workers willing to do those jobs,” Chishti said. “Some of the jobs are so inherently backbreaking, to put it mildly, that U.S. workers just wouldn’t take them. So those industries — since the cost would be so high, we would lose them all. They would go abroad.”
Foreign-born residents account for roughly 40% of workers at lodging businesses; 26% at restaurants; and 60% at landscaping services companies, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, which doesn’t distinguish between documented and undocumented workers.
