Over at National Review, Jason Richwine comments on one of my hobby horses:
Early in his first term as Florida governor, Ron DeSantis pressed the legislature to mandate universal E-Verify, the online tool run by the Department of Homeland Security that allows employers to confirm that their employees are legally authorized to work in the U.S. Unfortunately, business interests lobbied hard against it, and the bill that eventually reached the governor’s desk required E-Verify only for the public sector and its contractors....With greater political capital thanks to his smashing victory last week, DeSantis should try again for universal E-Verify.
The Republican Party has long been viewed as a happy collaboration of business conservatives and social conservatives whose interests rarely conflict. Business conservatives want low taxes and less regulation while social conservatives want abortion restrictions, gun rights, and so forth. Both sides can usually ignore the other without a problem.
But what happens on the odd occasion when a real conflict breaks out? Immigration is a great test case. Social conservatives want less of it but business conservatives want continued access to lots of cheap, docile labor. Who wins?
Let's take a look. Mandatory E-Verify works. This is why business conservatives hate it. Building a wall, by contrast, is little more than emotional symbolism, which is why social conservatives love it and business conservatives don't care one way or the other.
So what did Donald Trump do? Naturally he built a wall and ignored E-Verify. Business conservatives were happy since they knew the wall was little more than a con with no lasting impact. What did the Florida legislature—which was 70% Republican at last count—do when they were given a choice? They voted down mandatory E-Verify. Business conservatives were satisfied yet again and social conservatives were just sort of confused. They'd been suckered one more time.
So the answer to who really controls the Republican Party is: business conservatives. Nearly everyone who's really thought about it agrees that the most effective single thing we could do to rein in illegal immigration is to pass mandatory E-Verify at the national level and fund it with fines levied on employers. That would piss off business interests, which is probably the best indication that it's actually effective. It's also why it's consistently dead in the water.
Now, this would reduce ordinary illegal immigration, but it wouldn't necessarily have any effect on asylum filings, which represent a whole different problem. That requires a massive expansion of the judicial system so that asylum cases can be resolved quickly and fairly. But that's a topic for another day.
Actually businesses don't LIKE E-verify because of the burden it imposes on them to verify an employees background.
In today's world losing an employee (especially in a field that not many Americans find attractive) becomes MORE of a problem than the onerous fines are. THATs the real issue here.
And DeSantis signed a bill regarding public sector having to use E-verify? Well as a former public sector employee I had to show proof of residency, a current drivers license, a utility bill as proof of my legal status. I also had to pass a drug and back ground check. I'm sure Florida is much the same
So, who the hell does DeSantis think he was fooling by signing that lousy legislation into law in Florida?
E Verify works but you have to have enforcement in order for it to work. DeSantis is appearing to be more and more the "empty suit"
It takes an employer a few days to a few weeks to get authorized to use E-Verify. Once authorized to use it, each employee they enter into the system takes a few seconds to a few minutes to get a response regarding their legal employability.
I fail to see how burdensome this is, but I'm also not trying to make excuses for why employers cannot possibly be expected to take on this burden, when employers in all of our peer countries do a similar process mandated by their own national governments.
The burden isn't the process; the burden is the result.
Lots of hard-working immigrants who have exerted great effort--and sometimes taken great risks--to get here, to chase their little piece of the American dream, but who will no longer be available to do hard work without complaining.
How are the businesses that lose them going to replace them? They will have to pay more money to hire Americans who don't have the same work ethic, often because their impression of "hardships" would pale in comparison to those immigrants.
How many jobs are the sort of work one might hire an illegal immigrant for (Remember, legal immigrants will pass E-verify)? Some jobs are of that sort, but a very large number are not-- why should the employers offering those jobs give a hoot about having to use E-verify?
So, you're basically saying that employers don't like e-verify because it is effective at making it harder or, at least riskier, to hire workers here illegally, which is the whole point of e-verify.
There are far too many employers especially along the border that do NOT want to use E-verify. They patrol the streets in the cities and towns along the border looking for "day" workers for agriculture and construction.
For other employers E-verify can pose a burden.
Take for instance meat processing - a job that is loathsome to most Americans. Smithfield Foods employs 6 interpreters just in 1 facility here in NC. They employ Mexicans. South Vietnamese, Hmong, Chinese and several other groups. Many of their employees do NOT speak English at all.
Its a terrible system which is made worse by the companies who want got get by using people that will work for next to nothing.
But DeSantix legislation was so watered down. Public Sector employers? Of course they don't hire illegals. You have to drug screen, have verified housing, etc. That bill that Ron signed did NOTHING at all.
I don’t mind e-verify
Even as a person who is in favor of greater immigration, seems in my interest to reduce illegal immigration. Tacitly endorsing the presence of a huge community with uncertain legal status feels like a recipe for an underclass who could get stomped by the next MAGA wave
Would be great if we can stop the flow of illegal immigrants so that we can have an actual debate on how many immigrants we should be letting in. Once they’re here legally, its much harder for the next demagogue to send around unmarked vans and round them up. If they can’t get here legally, probably in their interest not to come at all
As-is, the relationship between US business interests and illegal immigrants feels like someone in the neighborhood feeding stray dogs. So far we’ve been beating on the dogs, but it’s not really their fault. They’re responding to incentives, and you’ll never drive them off while there’s opportunity there. Why not punish the guy you can get to
Just my thoughts on the matter
We won't stop the flow of "illegals" until we provide a queue and the possibility of entry into the US. We didn't have an immigration problem until we started restricting the flow of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Really the GOP doesn't want to fix things, they like the system as it is, a ready pool of labor to exploit and a ready pool of "others" to whip up the masses in a frenzy of hate.
If they can’t get work here, I guess I don’t see why they would come at all
And i agree that e-verify would undercut the GOP. That’s sort of by design as far as I’m concerned
"As-is, the relationship between US business interests and illegal immigrants feels like someone in the neighborhood feeding stray dogs."
That is not my impression at all. I don't think businesses hire immigrants as a favor to the immigrants. Quite the opposite, I think the businesses recognize what a bargain they can get: harder-working personnel at equal or lower wages than they would have to pay labor in the "open market."
The point of the analogy is that businesses are the easy target here. At the end of the day if a business doesn’t feel the risk is worth it to hire illegal immigrants, they won’t. Chasing people through the desert (beating on the dogs) is a dumb way to do it
I’ll admit it was a tortured analogy. Sorry about that
"business conservatives want continued access to lots of cheap, docile labor"
That's why they like large immigration inflows, legal or illegal, and why unions have historically opposed immigration.
So why did the Democrats reverse their general opposition to immigration sometime around 1965?
The Democrats transformation into a multi-racial coalition with equal rights for everyone meant fixing the highly racist previous immigration system.
Non-citizens should have equal rights to citizens?
Atticus, perhaps Hokie Annie has used a word you don't recognize.
Did I misunderstand her? Sounds like she was implying prior "racist" immigration system needed to be changed because it was not providing equal rights to immigrants (including illegals).
Of course non-citizens do not and should not have the the same rights as US citizens.
Many US citizens have loved ones who aren't citizens also various ethnic groups in the US in the 1960s began pushing to reform immigration in the name of equity to get rid of the odious quota system that favored immigrants from Northern Europe. That is quite different from arguing for equal rights for non-citizens.
Generally, yes, the Bill of Rights secures rights to ‘the people’. The courts have interpreted this to mean ‘all resident persons subject to US jurisdiction’.
I was thinking mainly of the right to vote because I thought that was what the original commenter was referring to. In re-reading the comments maybe that wasn't the case.
Exactly, I wasn't referring to voting rights but the right to immigrate to the US not being predicated on a quota system favoring Europeans.
Building a wall, by contrast, is little more than emotional symbolism,
Environmentally-destructive emotional symbolism at that, and a colossal waste of resources. I have no problem with erecting/fortifying physical barriers in those limited sections of the border where it make sense to do so. Just like I have no problem with E-verify. But the Wall was always stupid and destructive. In 2022, border security depends on things like drones, CCTV, AI, better software, and so on (as well as, needless to say, the demand side).
I'm a member of the local cactus society, and when I saw the photos of all the sagueros, pipe organ cacti, and others that had been dug up and dumped from a national monument for cacti, which happened to be "on the border", I was sickened. Those things are endangered; the specimens dug up and killed may have been centuries old and irreplaceable, and in the end, what good did it do?
Also the wildlife. Let's not forget them, their ranges and migration paths and habitat.
Well it allowed a Daddy Republican to say they were Doing Something to solve a problem without actually solving the problem. Similar to how DeSantis destroyed 20ish people’s lives by having them arrested for voting post-release from prison so that suburban and rural Floridians can feel their elections are safe, or human-trafficked migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard so those same suburban and rural Floridians can feel that they aren’t going to be overrun by undocumented persons. It’s all show (“vice signalling”) for Republicans, and if there’s collateral damage that’s somebody else’s problem.
Also the wildlife. Let's not forget them, their ranges and migration paths and habitat.
It's really a tragedy. Some of the most beautiful natural landscapes on our planet (harsh and forbidding beauty to be sure in the eyes of many, but beautiful nonetheless) and yes, home to lots of creatures we share North America with. But the pig-ignorant, egomaniacal lunatic who used to reside in the White House couldn't resist the urge to despoil.
Plenty of ppl get the demographic shift narrative wrong, including myself 10 years ago. The growing Hispanic % that is reducing the White-only % in the US, does not signal a permanent political shift favoring Democrats. Rather, what it does is force the GOP to abandon a White-dominant embrace, because if they fail to do so, they may trigger a more durable political shift favoring Democrats.
DeSantis ought to follow his White-dominant policies to his heart's desire for all of the short-term political benefits that he can gain.
It's the "assimilation" that the right always claims that Hispanic immigrants don't do - their political preferences are less dominated by immigration/racial concerns and more by taxes, culture war and whatnot.
I increasingly suspect the divide in Democratic circles isn't so much ideology as the elitist vs. Regular Joe vibe.
I definitely think the "regular Joe" quality of Fetterman's brand helped widen the appeal of his progressivism. TBH same dynamic as Bernie (with his thick Brooklyn accent and rumpled attire). Normie voters seem to dislike elitism and crave authenticity.
whoops...wrong thread!
Perhaps. But I still agree. But the Democrats have a very, very shallow bench of Regular Joes or Joannes.
Agreed, although I really despise how knowledge and experience is being dramatically undervalued by “normie” voters. With every election cycle, the quality of candidates seems to get worse, probably because people who actually know stuff and/or have experience running large governmental units just don’t want to get thrown into the mud with the pigs that the other side is going to invariably produce. I suspect even if smart and/or competent people don’t die out as envisioned in the movie, permanent Idiocracy-style rule is going to arrive sooner than we all think.
It seems to me that migration from Mexico/Central and South America is a complex problem that doesn’t get solved by simple solutions like E-verify or Wall building. And climate change is going to make the entire thing even more complex. But people always want simple solutions, and if it’s true (and I think it is) that “politics is marketing” then I guess calling for E-verify is a better solution than calling for building a hate wall.
Most of our peer countries have similar systems to E-Verify, and most of them don't see anywhere near as many undocumented/unauthorized migrants from Mexico, Central or South America (or from anywhere else). I understand that geographic proximity means we will always get more Mexican/Central/South American migrants than our peer countries. But, considering one of the main ways people get into this country illegally is arriving on a tourist or student visa and then just staying here once it expires, it seems E-Verify would do a lot to reduce that from continuing to be a successful strategy.
Overstaying one’s visa doesn’t make for compelling video, so Americans need to be constantly reminded of this route of unauthorized immigrationn against which a wall is useless, and a diversion from actually effective steps.
If E-verify does pass, what happens to the millions who are already here illegally? E-verify is not a solution, it is only one step, and further steps would be contested by one side or the other.
Yes, it would probably only make sense as a part of comprehensive immigration reform, which would likely need to provide some sort of path-to-citizenship option for those already here. It seems like a good opportunity to me for the Democrats to take advantage of the the coming GOP caucus' instability to push for a bipartisan reform package. Even if it's not allowed to come up for a vote, it would present the Democrats and whatever Republicans who would sign on as the only ones really trying to address illegal immigration.
Agreed that it’s only a step and not the whole solution. But you gotta start somewhere. For example, cracking down on future sales of guns would do nothing about the 300+ million already in circulation… but it’s still a more constructive idea in curbing gun violence than waiting around for the “perfect” all-comprehensive solution to arrive. Same with e-verify: if we’re going to punish undocumented workers for existing here, then at the very least we should also punish employers equally as harshly for drawing them here and hiring them.
First E-verify. We need to stop digging the hole. First, pass legislation to slow the flood of illegals. Second, figure out what to do with the people already here.
So according to Kevin's chart, last year the number of asylum filings, especially at ports of entry, reached a 6 year low. Now I have no problem with the idea that the right wing press has got "The Border Problem" completely backwards, but if it had been true I'd have expected the Biden administration to mention that fact at some point. Since they didn't I'm assuming that Kevin's numbers are off somehow. Seriously, not a single word about 6 year low in new asylum claims.
I know I’m a nobody commenting on a modestly successful blog, but COME ON! The Republicans spent all of 2021 declaring that Joe Biden was personally destroying America because an endless line of people were walking across the border, asking for asylum, and then disappearing into nothing - after first causing the utter destruction of Texas. But Kevin’s numbers claim that fewer people asked for asylum than during any Trump year. And no one in the Biden administration ever bothered to mention this? I want to know how this could be (or how Kevin’s numbers are wrong).
I do not understand why democrats are so in favor of immigration and asylum. The movement of hard working skilled people (or single women with several children in tow!) from low income countries does little or nothing for America and wrecks the home countries. It triggers the right wing unnecessarily too.
Now maybe these places are beyond help. Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and much of Africa are, perhaps, places which cannot be saved from violence and poverty. Is it then our responsibility to depopulate those places and bring the people into developed countries? (EU, US, Canada, etc.)
I don't personally think so, but that seems to be the net effect of our current policy preferences from both democrats and business interests. To me it makes more sense to eliminate this migration via rules and enforcement but if that's not your thing, then how about explaining how we get all these poor people to safety. Why make them pay smugglers and make risky trips through the desert. No one on the left seems interested in imagining such a result even though they oppose (mostly) limits and robust enforcement.
Um where the F have you been for the last several decades? Immigration politics is just like abortion politics. Powerful republicans don’t really want cheap labor to go away, any more than they want this country to be filled with lots of American citizen babies whom nobody can afford to care for dumped into the welfare and/or foster care system. But they use both issues to inflame their voters into voting for them. By never actually solving either issue - but also keeping both issues burning fiercely - they reap winning majorities in lots of states and many congressional seats. Now that everyone’s seen what happens if “the dog catches the car” on abortion… there’s no way Republicans are ever going to agree to solve the immigration issue. So we’ll muddle along like we have been doing for decades with no comprehensive immigration reform until either (1) Dems get a supermajority in the Senate and pass immigration reform entirely on their own or (2) Republicans inadvertently catch the car again via SCOTUS and wipe out all the cheap labor provided by immigrants, and get the business community royally pissed.
Justin: "The movement of hard working skilled people from low income countries does little or nothing for America."
Well, that's a new theory. America doesn't have any use for hard working skilled people. I guess I'll have to investigate that theory.
We have plenty of such hard working people already.
I'm not really knowledgeable about how to reform immigration but Dems have been in favor of it, not just as you say opposing limits and/or robust enforcement. It seems there are many ways to improve what's in place : E-Verify, more and faster courts for adjudicating asylum requests and probably paths to citizenship for people who have already been here a while.
Moreover, it seems to me that the "movement of hard working skilled people"
to the US does a lot of good and is necessary given that our birth rate is slowing significantly. Increasingly, climate change is going to force this migration and
it's not clear that it hurts the countries that the migrants are leaving, particularly if, along with immigration reform we focus our energies on improving things in our neighbor and near neighbor countries.
BUT, for the past 15 years the GOP has been opposed to even rational discussion about this preferring to use it as a political bludgeon instead. .
Most of the work done by undocumented workers is either cash-under-the table, off-the-books kind of stuff that E-verify wouldn't catch or contract labor for farms or meatpackers, garment factories, etc. The problem with E-verify is who is ultimately held responsible for using it? A Central Valley rancher hardly ever hires workers directly to prune and orchard or pick fruit -- that's done by labor contractors who ostensibly do background checks on the people they use, but everyone knows its a total joke. Supposedly the farm owner and the contractor are "jointly" responsible for worker safety, eligibility, etc., but in reality it's a gray area where each claims the other is responsible for checking papers, etc. If a state were to require that every "employer" use E-verify, it would probably result in two eternities of lawsuits and far more work for lawyers than for field workers as contractors and business owners fought to the death over who the actual "employer" was.
Right, E-Verify will reduce the demand-side of illegal immigration but there are a couple big loopholes.
I think the outsourcing one is complicated - on one hand the same E-Verify would apply to temp agencies, cleaning services and whatnot, so the legal liabilities mean people will be less likely to operate work-status-laundering go-betweens.
Making companies liable for immigration status of their labor supply chains would probably take some careful crafting to avoid covering _goods_ supply chains or residential plumbers.
On the third hand I think we now have laws covering human trafficking in labor supply chains so maybe that crafting has already been done.
I saw some of that hostility some years ago during an ill-advised foray into a forum that turned out to be dominated by conservative-intellectual types:
"The left doesn't have any solution to illegal immigration!"
"Um, what about mandatory E-Verify?"
"The left doesn't have any solution to illegal immigration other than jailing capitalists!"
My only point here is: don't confuse real capitalists with CAPINOs (capitalists in name only). Anyone that wants to understand real capitalism should read "Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose" or listen to the "What if da Vinci Built Companies?" podcast (per below link).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V65JIAM_LfY
E-verify should be better funded and improved, and should be mandatory compliance by employers, with stiff financial and legal penalties for circumventing the process. This and increasing immigration court capacity for asylum seekers are the only effective methods for controlling illegal immigration.
None of this works without comprehensive immigration reform, since the lost labor force would have significant negative impact in many industries. At the end of the day, the GOP won't do this because their "chamber of commerce" type supporters and doners don't want to lose the cheaper labor, and the the right wing MAGA types can't stomach potentially giving "those people" a pathway to citizenship. The GOP does not want to lose this wedge issue which they have successfully exploited for decades.
The following, whatever it might appear to be, is a serious attempt to contribute to this dialog. I acknowledge that this is a far-from-perfect understanding, but I’m also suggesting that it represents a significant improvement.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, history never repeats but it always rhymes. That’s because literally every human interaction is a context-specific manifestation of the same context-independent pattern. The “Businesses hate E-Verify. Should Ron DeSantis try to pass it anyway?” story is no exception.
I’m suggesting that anyone will find it useful if they look at every human interaction through a simple common lens. Ask yourself how the parties that represent conflicting interests are behaving toward people that are being influenced by their decisions in terms of who are subjects of their concern, and who are they treating like objects. I define objects as opportunities to be exploited, threats to be neutralized, or otherwise irrelevant. Subjects are in –– and objects are excluded from –– that person’s circle of concern.
Through that lens, it appears clear to me why life is good and simple if you have a small circle of concern that encompasses a small circle of influence. Life is a bit more complicated for the Donald and Ronald twins because, although they both have small circles of concern (which, for Ron, might be bigger than “me, myself, and I,” but not much), whereas they have a large circle of influence. As a result, the degree of difficulty of the moment-to-moment decisions is very low. The only complication involves dealing with the fallout of the many simple-minded decisions that never address the complex situations that they’re facing. Life gets a lot more complicated, but in a good way, for people with a circle of concern that encompasses a large circle of influence.
To me, the A-side are the people that never put anyone in a position of leadership that obviously has a much smaller circle of concern relative to the job-specific circle of influence, even when they think they’re in the proposed leader’s circle of concern, and especially when they are the proposed leader. That applies to choosing a POTUS as much as it does to choosing the person that’s going to coach your kid’s soccer team.
A-side people support real Republicans and/or real Democrats. B-side people support RINOs and DINOs because they think they’re subjects of that small circle of concern, whereas they’re actually just opportunities to be exploited. The B-side generally don’t recognize that they’re all on the same side because they hate each other. What they should notice is that that’s irrespective of whether or not they happen to be in the same party.
So my repetitive question to everyone, and don’t exclude myself, is which side are you on?
Yesterday, while looking through this lens at Charlie Baker in conversation with Jake Tapper, it appears very clear to me that he is/was a successful governor because he correctly aligned himself with the A-side, and correctly gave credit to the environment his parents established at home when he was a kid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGToiJF9spA
There's a long list of things I don't agree with Charlie Baker about. That said, I got to watch him in action a few years ago. My wife and I had the fortune to be given tickets to a performance of Hamilton in Boston from a friend of my wife who had connections to one of the companies associated with the road production. It was a special show with half the audience being middle school kids from Boston public schools which made for a very interesting audience response to the play - they booed and jeered loudly at Hamilton's infidelity. I was sitting only a few rows away from Baker and I watched him hob nob with lots of people, many obviously "important" people and he seemed very comfortable with all these interactions. But at intermission he made a beeline for the middle school kids behind and above us and I watched him get down low (Charlie is tall) and talk to a number of kids and seemed just as at ease with them as with the big shots and he wasn't there for just 30 seconds, he spent a good chunk if the intermission listening to the kids reactions to Hamilton. Yes, I know that's smart performative politics but I have to say it didn't look like a performance, it looked like he was genuinely interested in the kids.
I am happy to have another Democrat, Maura Healey, as our Governor now but the sad truth is that the GOP in Massachusetts and elsewhere is dominated by people who HATE Charlie Baker. The GOP has become a party of nasty idiots.
Thank you for that … great story. I’d like to take a crack at explaining it through the lens I referred to in my original post.
First, literally everything I know about Charlie Baker is in the above two comments and the interview. Second, his interview comments and your observations tell me that his parents brought him up to be a genuine and real human being. Third, your comments and the fact that he’s a Republican tell me he’s bought into the fundamentalist ideology that is the libertarian version of capitalism promoted most famously in Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962).
That means that anyone talking to him in person is in his circle of concern. Paradoxically, that means that he is in favor of enacting government policies that have an unfairly negative effect on people that are marginalized by society because they exist outside of his circle of concern.
There would be no paradox if he understood real capitalism, which is based on Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759) that operates “through a logic of mirroring, in which a spectator imaginatively reconstructs the experience of the person he watches.” In other words, Smith is telling people that make corporate decisions to do what Charlie’s parents taught him to do.
The paradox is due to Milton Friedman’s “Theory of Immoral Sentiments,” which says that “direct and indirect government intervention … should be stopped wherever possible (because the) doctrine of ‘social responsibility’, that corporations should care about the community and not just profit, is highly subversive to the capitalist system and can only lead toward totalitarianism.” In other words, Friedman is telling people that make corporate decisions to do precisely the opposite of what Charlie’s parents taught him to do.
Friedman’s idea is buried deep within the collective unconscious of the Republican Party. That’s why, when objective evidence that the economy does better during Democratic administrations is presented to a (capitalist in name only) Republican, or that supports the theory of evolution is presented to a Christian (in name only) fundamentalist, the response is the same. Fortunately with Charlie, if I got that response while trying to explain real capitalism, I could get his attention by telling him, “If your parents were here, they’d be giving you a time out right about now.”
The greatest benefit of the happy collaboration between labor intensive businesses and the demagogues using immigration as a wedge to split the electorate is the ability to threaten migrant labor with deportation when they complain about low wages and dangerous working conditions. No one should expect Gov. DeSantis to interfere with this profitable business model.