Say Anything Blog

Obama is creating the jobs Americans won’t do.

Studies by two conservative think tanks estimate immigrants in the United States illegally could take 300,000 construction jobs, or 15% of the 2 million jobs that new taxpayer-financed projects are predicted to create.

They fault Congress for failing to require that employers certify legal immigration status of workers before hiring by using a Department of Homeland Security program called E-Verify. The program allows employers to check the validity of Social Security numbers provided by new hires. It is available to employers on a voluntary basis.

Remember that Democrats stripped out requirements that companies getting “stimulus” funds use E-Verify when the House and Senate versions of the stimulus were reconciled to go to Obama for a vote.

House and Senate negotiators dropped a separate proposal that would have forced all employers benefiting from stimulus money to use the government’s Web-based E-Verify system to vet the employment status of their workers. . . .

The E-Verify provision that was left out of the stimulus bill would have required companies benefiting from the $787 billion package to vet information in job applications by comparing it to data in work-eligibility databases maintained by the U.S. Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. Also excised from the bill was a proposed extension of the overall E-Verify program beyond March 6, when it is scheduled to expire.

Just so you’ve got this straight, our government is refusing to use a citizenship verification system that we taxpayers are paying to make available.

Of course, this is all based on the assumption that Obama’s “stimulus” is actually going to create jobs.  Which isn’t something I buy into.  In order to spend stimulus money the government must first take that money from someone else.  I think the “stimulus” money would have created jobs anyway if left in the market.  All the government is doing is transferring wealth around from places where it would create lots of jobs organically to places where it’ll create fewer jobs because the government a) costs money to administer the transfer and b) distributes the money a lot less efficiently than the market would.