E-Verify shuts down illegal immigration's magnet

Ten years ago today, President George W. Bush signed into law the Secure Fence Act, a bill requiring the kind of 700-mile partition on our southern border so controversially called for by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The mandate to build double-layered fencing, which was designed to stop not only illegal border-crossers on foot, but also drug-traffickers by car, passed breezily in both chambers and garnered a supportive vote from Hillary Clinton, then in her fifth year as New York’s junior senator.

Trump’s proposal, of course, shows we never actually got what our reps voted for, a scenario known all too well by immigration-control advocates.

While an advisor to former Mexican president Vicente Fox in the early 2000s, Fredo Arias-King led a delegation to discuss immigration policy with members of Congress; what he was told in closed-door exchanges has become lore in restrictionist circles.

Several dozen congressmen from either side of the aisle not only candidly voiced their absolute support for open-borders, but also admitted their active abuse of our immigration laws. “Often laughingly,” they told him, when forced to consider anti-immigration bills, they would simply “defang” or “gut” them “by neglecting to fund this program or tabling that provision” or simply deleting the measure entirely...

The biggest magnet for illegal immigration is employment: the “linchpin” to deterrence according to the former chair of the 1994 Commission on Immigration Reform, Barbara Jordan...

Co-administered by DHS and the Social Security Administration, the ‘electronic verification’ system allows employers to verify that their potential employees are actually authorized to work in the country. The program’s not mandatory on a federal-basis, but around 600,000 employers (including federal agencies) use it across the 16 states that do require it. According to the E-Verify Employer Agent Alliance, 20 million cases were processed last fiscal year.

Where it’s been most comprehensive, the results have been striking.

When Arizona made E-Verify mandatory in 2008, it was so successful in pushing illegal aliens back home that the neighboring Mexican state of Sonora sent a delegation to Tucson to complain that they couldn’t handle the returning influx...

Returning the country to a nation of laws will require an amped up vigilance on the part of its citizenry. They’ll have to show the political elite that if they continue to ignore the American people, it will be at their peril, not America’s.