Opening Statement
Ranking Member Conyers' Opening Statement for Subcommittee Hearing on: H.R.___ , the " Legal Workforce Act"
Washington, DC,
February 4, 2015
Statement of Congressman John Conyers, Jr. The subject of today's hearing is very familiar to us. Over the past four years, this subcommittee has held six hearings on E-Verify, the government's electronic employment verification system. First: Each time we have looked at this – each time we have considered the "Legal Workforce Act" – I have said that E-Verify is an important tool. But I have also said that E-Verify cannot be made mandatory for all employers without comprehensive reforms to our nation's broken immigration system. That is a very important point. For years, some people have argued that to fix the broken system, we need only enforce the laws on the books. But we know that is not a real and viable solution. We cannot rely solely upon enforcement of our broken laws. The truth is that enforcement without reform will actually hurt the American worker, but if we fix our broken immigration system we can help American workers and grow our economy. To put it another way, the Congressional Budget Office told us in December that enacting this bill into law would increase the deficit by $30 billion over 10 years, but enacting the Senate-passed immigration reform bill (S. 744) would reduce the budget deficit by $158 billion over the first 10 years and by about $685 billion over the next 10 years. Second: Whenever we talk about E-Verify, it is important that we think about how the world really works. I have heard people say that E-Verify will help American workers because every time an undocumented immigrant is denied a job, an unemployed American can get hired. It's a pretty simple idea, and i see how appealing it is. But the problem is that it is false. Immigrants often fill gaps in our workforce where there are not enough Americans willing to do the work. Because 50-70 percent of the nation's farm workers are undocumented, mandatory E-Verify would be especially devastating to that industry. No one would pick the fruits and vegetables in the fields, and they would be left to rot. American farms would go under, and jobs would be moved overseas, including the million of upstream and downstream American jobs supported by agriculture. When we first considered this bill in the 112th Congress, the Legal workforce Act contained a simple solution for the agricultural industry: it created a special carve-out in the law to exempt farmers from the requirement to use E-Verify. Nifty solution. And in the final days of the 113th Congress, this committee reported to the floor this bill and an agricultural guestworker bill. But in part because that guest worker proposal did not have much support, neither bill went anywhere. Third: E-Verify could already be required for employers around the country. Had House Republicans taken up the bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in 2006, mandatory E-Verify would be the law today. Instead, Republican leaders in the House chose not to act on either of those proposals. So they withered and died on the vine – just like the crops that would go unpicked if this bill were to become law without broader changes to our immigration system. I thank the witnesses for being here and I hope they will address some of these larger points today. |
