Utah’s business-first Republicans again voted down a plan to strengthen curbs on employers who want cheap labor by hiring illegal migrants.
The Utah House Business, Labor, and Commerce Committee torpedoed HB 294 that would have expanded the use of E-Verify to companies that employ 50 people from the current limit of 150 or more. And this isn’t the first time.
The Utah House blocked a similar bill last year after businesses flooded lawmakers with warnings that their pool of cheap labor would dry up and companies would be hurt.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the committee didn’t hear from anyone in opposition to this year’s bill. But despite that, lawmakers blocked the rules change.
Republican State Rep. Tiara Auxier was behind the bill and noted that illegal migrants steal the Social Security Numbers of American citizens — usually children whose numbers aren’t expected to be used for 15 or more years to come. She feels that identity theft needs to be stopped because it hurts kids just when they hope to start getting into their first jobs only to find they have IRS problems before earning their first legal dollar. But she also noted that an entire criminal class is out there stealing people’s identities.
“It wasn’t just people coming here undocumented and working here undocumented,” Auxier said, the paper reported. “It was stealing people’s identities so that they were able to work.”
Unfortunately, many Republicans in Salt Lake City don’t support E-Verify at all. Republican Sen. Scott Sandall, for instance, claimed E-Verify doesn’t work.
“If it worked, it’d be great,” Sandall exclaimed, “But there have been so many times that I’ve heard people just say it just doesn’t work, and so I don’t think there’s any reason to tie any more to it.”
Republican State Rep. Neil Walter also saw his bill, HB214, go down to defeat. Walter says that the debate on the bill went too far afield from the identity theft issue he was trying to focus on.
“My feeling was that we ought to be putting the security interests of our citizens first, and we ought to be putting our employers and employees … on an even playing field,” Walter said, according to The Deseret News.
His bill stated that any business with five or more employees would be mandated to use E-Verify in its hiring practices.
Walter’s bill also confirmed that any potential employee caught using stolen or fake identities would be subject to prosecution.
“There are currently hundreds of Utah children whose government ID is being used by an adult to receive wages and thousands of Social Security numbers being used by three to 10 last names for employment purposes, according to Utah Department of Workforce Services data,” Desert News added.
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