As some of you have already seen, the aggressive misinformation about E-Verify started in Florida before Governor DeSantis even signed the bill into law (which he did on May 10th):
The most prominent clickbait story about the bill out of the gate was a semi-viral May 7th video about construction "stopping" at sites in Miami, Florida:
Obviously, this claim is nonsensical on a number of levels. First, as I mentioned, the bill hadn't become law yet. Second, mandatory E-Verify only applies to [i]new hires[/i], so nobody currently working has to stop anything they are doing.
Here's another video, and this one triggered some news coverage:
A big reason we support mandating E-Verify for new hires is that it doesn't cause this kind of short-term disruption while still putting us on a solid path to the goal of ending illegal work. It turns the conversation on work to the notional and intangible "unfilled" job opening and allows us to focus on what wages they are offering.
To the extent that any of this pushback is truly happening, we should see it as economic warfare in the form of a work boycott being perpetrated by the beneficiaries of illegal workers... which is primarily big business and the illegal workers themselves.
As economist George Borjas and the National Academy of Sciences have found:
Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer... I estimate the current 'immigration surplus' - the net increase in the total wealth of the native population - to be about $50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.
The worst optics loose labor market forces can muster for this is a "Help Wanted" sign in a shop window, also known as a sign of impending relief for an unemployed American... and an invitation for productivity gains that actually benefit workers.
Meanwhile, we've seen others - even those who have supported other good immigration policy measures - making fantastical claims about how E-Verify will force us to take vaccines. In the past, our opposition even tried to convince people that E-Verify will be a mandatory gun registry. Even the most craven in the mainstream media haven't amplified these unhinged narratives.
"Why on earth do you think 'X' has something to do with E-Verify?" is a first-line defense to consider anytime you come across someone who seems opposed to E-Verify. The chances are, their understanding of how E-Verify works is as shallow as a pan.
The thing about the open border cartel's anti-E-Verify narratives is: their best isn't any good.
If you'd like to know more about the new Florida law, here is Governor DeSantis' one-pager visual for the bill.
ANDREW GOOD is the Director of the Media Standards Program for NumbersUSA
