The Rest of the News for May 17th

There was some good news for President Trump. Yesterday's alleged blockbuster about him giving classified intel to the Russians gained some perspective:

Newsbusters:

Guests Remind NBC, CNN: Obama Gave Classified Intel to Russia

While NBC and CNN joined the rest of the media in rushing to condemn the Trump White House over an unconfirmed Washington Post report that the President inadvertently shared classified information with Russian officials, guests on both networks provided important context that the Obama administration intentionally shared classified intelligence with Russia less than a year ago.

Unfortunately for Trump, the media got a better story to run with today.

In other news...

Cato Institute:

E-Verify Has Delayed or Cost Half a Million Jobs for Legal Workers

E-Verify is a government national identification system that employers currently use voluntarily to screen out unauthorized immigrant workers. Members of Congress want to make the program mandatory for all employers with the Legal Workforce Act, which has passed the House Judiciary Committee three times. This legislation would be the largest employer regulation in terms of scale in the history of the United States, applying to every single employer and every single worker in the country and also roping in several agencies to run it.

The system has already proven remarkably ineffective at its intended purpose—keeping unauthorized workers away from jobs. In fact, in many cases, it does the opposite—keeping authorized workers away from employment. While many have focused on how making it mandatory would increase the number of these errors, E-Verify is already causing headaches and costing jobs for legal workers.  In fact, from 2006 to 2016, legal workers had about 580,000 jobs held up due to E-Verify errors, and of these, they lost roughly 130,000 jobs entirely due to E-Verify mistakes.

Here’s how E-Verify catches innocent people. The system checks information all workers must provide on their I-9 forms against the databases of either the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for legal immigrants or the Social Security Administration (SSA) for U.S. citizens. If the system fails to verify this information, it will issue a “tentative nonconfirmation” (TNC). People who receive a TNC must challenge it within two weeks or it turns into a “final nonconfirmation” (FNC), and the employer must fire them.

Legal workers can receive an erroneous TNC for a variety of reasons. Employers may have put their information into the system incorrectly. This is especially common for hyphenated names or individuals with multiple last names. It can also happen if someone changes their name, but SSA or DHS has failed to update their entry in the database. Errors can also occur when SSA or DHS employees enter a person’s information into the database.

If you ever need an example of how government regulations can cost people jobs, this is probably one of the most egregious examples.

However, this story doesn't show how many illegal immigrants were caught or turned away because of E-Verify. But even if the actual answer is in the millions, is it worth it?

This appears to be doubling down on stupid. We already have our immigration process over-regulated to the point where immigrants are trying to enter the country illegally. Now we add another law which impacts legal citizens?

Abraham Maslow said it best:

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

In the case of government, the only tool it has is the law.