Inside a flawed immigration system: Millions of undocumented workers and a verification program that few use

For all of Donald Trump’s railing against immigrants and Democrats’ insistence on creating a better pathway to citizenship, one thing almost no one ever talks about is a computer-based federal program that makes it easy for prospective employers to spot and reject unauthorized immigrants seeking jobs. ‘The status quo makes business sense’ And enrollment was even lower in Florida, although the state last year made E-Verify mandatory for employers with more than 25 workers, sparking an immediate backlash from some businesses. “It’s not in our macroeconomic interest to prevent unauthorized immigrants from working, because the U.S. population is aging,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “Because we haven’t had immigration reform to allow in more immigrants legally, people are just coming anyway, and they come in bigger and smaller numbers as our economy demands them.” David Bier, director of immigration studies at Cato, a conservative think tank, says there’s some evidence that large-scale immigration has kept the country out of recession and increased tax revenues, contrary to what Vance has said about undocumented immigrants draining Social Security funds. “What we’ve seen too often is employers weaponize it when workers start organizing,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, which represents 32,000 hotel and food service workers in Southern California and Arizona.