Inside a flawed immigration system: Millions of undocumented workers and a verification program that few use

WASHINGTON —  For all of Donald Trump’s railing against immigrants and Democrats’ insistence on creating a better pathway to citizenship, one thing almost no one ever talks about is a computer-based federal program that makes it easy for prospective employers to spot and reject unauthorized immigrants seeking jobs.
The program, known as E-Verify, is highly reliable and involves relatively little red tape. If fully utilized, many experts say, it could significantly curb the flow of undocumented immigrants by effectively removing one of the biggest reasons so many come to the United States illegally to begin with — getting a job.
Yet even though E-Verify is free for employers, with more than 98% of those checked being confirmed as work-authorized instantly or within 24 hours, the program is significantly underused.
Nationally the program is voluntary, except for certain businesses such as federal contractors. Most states don’t require employers to use it. In California, only about 16% of employer establishments are enrolled in E-Verify, even lower than the overall national figure of 27 %, according to a Times analysis of data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Its low use reflects the underlying reality that many businesses — and the broader economy — have come to rely on undocumented immigrants. And in many ways, it’s both symptomatic and an outcome of what both major political parties acknowledge is a “broken immigration system,” in which unauthorized employment has become an intractable condition that employers, consumers and politicians have lived with for years.
Employers face few sanctions for hiring undocumented workers. And the odds of getting inspected are even less than a taxpayer’s likelihood of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.
Even during the Trump administration, which stepped up enforcement and publicized a few raids, such as the 2018 sweep of 7-Eleven stores in L.A. and other cities, federal agents closed 6,065 cases of unauthorized employment and labor exploitation nationwide in 2019, its peak year, involving fewer than 31,000 undocumented workers, according to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), with Republican colleagues including Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Trump’s running mate, in June introduced a bill to make E-Verify mandatory across the country. But similar efforts in the past have repeatedly failed to win enough bipartisan support.
And one key reason: There are simply not enough “legal” workers to fill all the jobs a healthy, growing U.S. economy generates. And that’s especially so in low-wage industries.
Employers say that requiring E-Verify — without other overhauls to the immigration system, including easier ways to bring in workers — would be devastating.
“I think you would see a general overall collapse in California agriculture and food prices going through the roof if we didn’t have them do the work,” said Don Cameron, general manager at Terranova Ranch, which produces a variety of crops on 9,000 acres in Fresno County.
At least half of the 900,000 farmworkers in California are thought to be undocumented, even higher than what national surveys suggest, says Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. Neither Cameron nor most anyone else in California farms, among other sectors, is in favor of mandatory E-Verify.
Even in red states, which are more prone to require and use the program, E-Verify isn’t exactly widely popular in immigrant-heavy states. While Georgia’s participation rate is among the highest, at about 85%, only about 30% of employer establishments in Texas had signed up for it as of last year.
And enrollment was even lower in Florida, although the state last year made E-Verify mandatory for employers with more than 25 workers, sparking an immediate backlash from some businessess.
“If the documents [presented by a prospective worker] look good on their face, it’s good enough for them because they’re desperate for labor,” said Chris Thomas, a Denver-based attorney who has counseled scores of companies facing government investigations of their immigration practices.
“It’s a wink and a nod,” he said. “ The status quo makes business sense. ”
It’s not simply a matter of not having enough workers to do the hard, often dead-end and low-wage jobs that most U.S. citizens don’t want to do. It’s the shortage of workers overall, experts say.
For decades, birth rates in the U.S. have been declining, as they have in most of the economically developed world. Today, the birth rate among American women of childbearing age has dropped below the level needed to meet the country’s replacement rate. California’s birth rate is at its lowest in a century.
If the economy is to grow and prosper, as almost all Americans say they want it to, additional workers must come from somewhere else.
“It’s not in our macroeconomic interest to prevent unauthorized immigrants from working, because the U.S. population is aging,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “Because we haven’t had immigration reform to allow in more immigrants legally, people are just coming anyway, and they come in bigger and smaller numbers as our economy demands them.”
David Bier, director of immigration studies at Cato, a conservative think tank, says there’s some evidence that large-scale immigration has kept the country out of recession and increased tax revenues, contrary to what Vance has said about undocumented immigrants draining Social Security funds. Most economists agree that new arrivals have been crucial in sustaining high employment by filling many job openings in recent years.
Immigrants, for example, many of them undocumented, make up 40% of California’s home healthcare and child day-care employment, according to The Times’ calculations of Census Bureau data. That, in turn, helps other moms to stay in the labor force.
“The whole idea that these workers are bad for native-born workers — there’s not much evidence for that,” Bier said.
In the last four years, more than 9 million foreign nationals have migrated to the U.S., more than double the annual average of the prior decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. The bulk of the growth reflects people from multiple nations coming through the southwestern border without prior authorization, many of them seeking asylum.
The Census Bureau counted about 48 million immigrants in the U.S. last year, or 14.3% of the overall population — the highest since 1910. California’s foreign-born share of the population is the largest in the country, at 27.3% last year, according to an analysis of census statistics by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
The undocumented immigrant population was estimated at 11 million to 12 million in 2022 by Pew Research Center and other organizations, and is now almost certainly much higher. Most of working age are thought to be employed or working in the informal economy.
The surge of new arrivals, which include roughly 4 million refugees and asylum seekers in the last two years, has amped up the nation’s debate over immigration and prompted politicians to call for stricter enforcement at the borders and inside the country.
Trump has suggested that if he’s elected president again, he would round up undocumented immigrants at worksites. And he has spoken about mass deportation of as many as 15 million to 20 million undocumented immigrants. Aside from the fact that that number is even more than the total thought to be in the U.S., such mass deportations are neither practical nor welcomed by many citizens, experts say.
Trump’s administration removed an annual average of 80,000 unauthorized immigrants residing in the U.S., said Tara Watson, an economist at Brookings specializing in immigration. Deportations dropped under President Biden to around 30,000 a year.
Back in the early 1980s, California farmers recalled, federal agents would come swooping out of vans to chase undocumented workers who had been spotted in fields from an airplane. They would be sent back to Mexico, only to return a few days later because the borders were far more porous then.
Such raids are a thing of the past. Instead, since 1986, the U.S. has sought to weaken the so-called jobs magnet attracting people to enter illegally by requiring all employers to have their prospective employee fill out a form known as the I-9. Along with that, workers must provide documents to validate their identity and visa status with, for example, a U.S. passport or the combination of a driver’s license and Social Security card.
In purely legal terms, employers are supposed to look for obvious fake documents. Employers may be liable if they knowingly hire someone who isn’t authorized to work. At the same time, especially where minorities and immigrants are concerned, employers may be subject to charges of discrimination or civil rights violations if they’re too rigorous in examining the documents or rejecting workers.
E-Verify, launched in 1997, was meant to make a big difference, using the internet to screen out ineligible workers by matching their I-9 information with Social Security Administration data and other federal records. (The Social Security Administration reported almost 10 million mismatches with employee tax records in 2022, up 17% from 2021 and almost 30% from the prior four-year average.)
While E-Verify has always been voluntary, over the years, 10 states — including Florida, Georgia and Utah — have made E-Verify a requirement for all or most employers. An additional 11 states require it only for public employers, while the remainder, including California, make E-Verify strictly voluntary.
As of December, some 3.2 million employment sites nationwide were enrolled in E-Verify, according to data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. That’s about 1 in 4 employer establishments as counted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In California, about 286,525 worksites were participating in E-Verify last year, or about 1 in 6 employment places.
Nationally, 30% of the employers that had signed up for E-Verify used it last year, and 25% did so in California.
In its earlier years E-Verify was riddled with errors, but today is seen as highly reliable. Of the 10 million employees checked through E-Verify in the first quarter of this year, fewer than 2% were flagged as mismatches. Of those, about 18,000 employees, or only 0.2% of the total, were later confirmed as work-authorized. An additional 100,000 mismatch cases remained unresolved during the first quarter.
Yet without carrots or sticks to induce usage, most employers have little reason to do so.
“If you’re a small family business or small employer, you’ll stop at the paper-based [I-9] process,” said Lynden Melmed, a partner at the law firm BAL and former chief counsel of the Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees E-Verify. “Why would you go through that additional step? What is gained for you from having to train people on it and using an electronic tool?”
Tom Trujillo, who with his family owns eight fast-food restaurants in Southern California, said simply that it hasn’t come up. “Maybe the bureaucracy,” he said when asked why he’s not using E-Verify. “It’s not required in California,” he added.
There’s also an element of risk, or suspicion, dealing with government systems.
“It’s electronic. So if you do something that may be a little off of the system, it may bring you, the employer, to the attention of DHS,” said Randel Johnson, a fellow at Cornell Law School who has worked on immigration issues on Capitol Hill and for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“The E-Verify people, they can go run down the hall and go to the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officer and say, ‘Hey, Fred Jones down here is having some problems with E-Verify and this is raising suspicions. You should go out there and investigate.’”
In some cases, employers have been pressed by labor unions not to use E-Verify. Some union leaders see it as a threat to their membership.
“What we’ve seen too often is employers weaponize it when workers start organizing,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, which represents 32,000 hotel and food service workers in Southern California and Arizona. He said Local 11 last year got most of the 70 contracts it negotiated to include language that employers wouldn’t use E-Verify.
In Washington, many Democrats have indicated they will support a national requirement only if it is part of an overall reform that includes legalization of undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S., which most Republicans oppose.
Republicans also face resistance from some employers and special interest groups, whether farming or construction or other service sector that relies on immigrant labor. For them, it’s a bottom-line issue.
Surveys by Zachariah Rutledge, who studied at UC Davis and is now at Michigan State University, show that many California farmers face persistent labor shortages, in part because their predominantly immigrant workforce itself is aging and because bringing in farmworkers through U.S. temporary worker visas, the H-2A, can be very expensive.
At Terranova Ranch in Fresno County, Cameron employs about 65 year-round workers and, like many farms, uses contracted labor to bring on hundreds of more seasonal hands to help with planting and harvesting.
He said his farmworkers make $19 to $20 an hour, standard for the industry in California.
“I get a little ticked when I hear Hispanic workers are taking jobs from citizens,” he said. “I’ve been farming for 43 years and I’ve never had a white guy ask for a job. It’s all Hispanic workers. Who wants to work in 110-degree weather unless they have to support themselves?” he said, adding that they’re excellent workers and productive members of the community.
Cameron says he checks the documents of new hires but isn’t interested in E-Verify.
“Neither party has been able to get comprehensive immigration reform, which is unfortunate,” he said. “I guess we continue down the same road we’ve been for years.”
Cameron added: “We need employees. We couldn’t survive without them. We appreciate them, documented or undocumented.”