Should the Government Have the Power to “Turn Off Jobs”?

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By The Cato Institute
Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Secure the Border Act of 2023. Among other things, the bill would mandate that all employers use the E‑Verify program to prove that their new hires have federal authorization to work. A coalition of conservative advocacy organizations praised this provision because it would “turn off the ‘jobs magnet’ for illegal immigration.”

But is this good? Should the U.S. government really have the power to “turn off jobs”? The answer for people who believe in limited government is clearly no. The government in a free society should not have the power to decide who can work; free people shouldn’t have to request permission to work; and the founders of this country could not possibly have imagined a scenario where the federal government held a kill switch for everyone’s right to earn a living.

E‑Verify attempts to be a form of electronic national identification. Currently, it just runs a person’s name and Social Security Number against government databases. But the government is already incorporating photo IDs into the program, and it is only a matter of time before that becomes mandatory as well. The Secure the Border Act of 2023 mandates the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to pilot additional, possibly biometric, verification mechanisms as well.

Mandatory E‑Verify would create a centralized electronic record of all your employment activity, and the inevitable expansion to other economic and social activities would locate within DHS a comprehensive surveillance tool unlike any in the history of the United States. Unlike passive surveillance systems, E‑Verify could quickly be used to “turn off” the rights of people targeted by the government.

Right now, the “banned list” only includes people ineligible to work in the United States (which includes many people here legally but not eligible to work). But the immigration logic behind E‑Verify obviously extends to absolutely anything a person might want to do in the United States while here illegally. Laws already ban or survive their use of transit, driver’s licenses, bank accounts, apartments, gun sales, and access to certain federal buildings. Will conservatives oppose “turning off the bank account magnet” or allow illegal immigrants to buy guns? I doubt it.