Immigration: A win for Arizona

last updated 8 January 2015

“States do have the right to protect their citizens and their own borders,” said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. That’s the clear message sent by the Supreme Court’s decision last week to uphold an Arizona law punishing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The Obama administration had challenged that 2007 law, on the grounds that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, but that’s “a responsibility the feds have largely shirked.” That’s why Arizona has been requiring companies to check their employees’ legal status on E-Verify, a previously voluntary federal program. The Supreme Court’s pivotal ruling puts an “essential tool for immigration control” in states’ hands, said National Review. In Arizona, the E-Verify law has already proved its worth, with the number of illegal immigrants dropping nearly 18 percent in a year. Now other states can pass their own E-Verify laws, turning this system into a “national standard.”

But E-Verify “isn’t ready for prime time,’’ said the Los Angeles Times. Its computerized databases are often inaccurate, with estimated error rates ranging as high as 12 percent. Nationwide, as many as 4 million legal workers could be wrongly rejected for employment, unless they convince the bureaucracy to correct its records. Accurate or not, this system would “destroy American agriculture,’’ said Frank Sharry in Huffingtonâ€‹Post.com. Up to 75 percent of the laborers who harvest crops are undocumented. And if we deny jobs to 3 million farm workers, Americans will not “return to the fields to pick crops.’’ Instead, farms here will go out of business, and we’ll be forced to “import more of our produce from foreign sources,’’ raising prices for consumers.

That’s what the advocates of illegal immigration always say, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. But struggling blue-collar workers desperately need the millions of jobs now held by illegal immigrants. By holding employers responsible for whom they hire, E-Verify greatly reduces the demand for illegal workers—proving that government is not powerless to halt the tide of people crossing the border. That could be the first step to a sensible immigration policy like Canada’s, which is focused on attracting millions of highly educated, skilled people from Asia, Africa, and Europe. Our economy needs engineers, not dishwashers. “By learning from Arizona, and becoming more like Canada, we might finally have an immigration policy worthy of the U.S.A.”