California legislators have introduced employer-sanction bills in the Legislature there. Florida has an E-Verify-for-all-government-agencies bill moving through its legislature.
Has anyone wondered about the downstream effect of all this? Besides the employers.
I’m aching to see a study about what happens in the labor market after employment-verification laws are put in. Perhaps it’s too new to do a study (and the only state with a 100 percent requirement is Arizona), but from what our clients are telling us, the labor market is getting swampy.
Or more like calcified. We surveyed our Arizona clients last week about this — an estimated 12 percent of the workforce there is illegal — and here’s the results:
The new law makes it harder to hire qualified workers: 80 percent strongly agree
The labor market has gotten smaller since the new law passed: 65 percent strongly agree, 10 percent agree
(but in the categories of construction and hospitality, it’s 100 percent strongly agree).
The downstream effect, from our study, at least, is that the tighter labor supply due to E-Verify is doing two things: 1) Illegal employees that were employed before Jan. 1, 2008 are staying put; and 2) wages are going up.
We had a conversation with a restaurant owner the other day who said that job he’d usually pay presumptive illegals $5-$7 for he’s now having to pay out $8-$9 for. He calls it “The Price of Legality.”
Tags: e-verify, economics, labor shortage
