Ron Paul, who served in the US House of Representatives as a Republican from Texas, submitted comments on Wednesday to the Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee warning of many dangers that may arise from making E-Verify a mandatory component of hiring under US law. Mandatory E-Verify is one of the “tough on illegal immigration” proposals being considered in Congress.
Paul, who is the founder and chairman of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, includes in his detailed discussion of mandatory E-Verify dangers the following synopsis:
Mr. Chairman, mandatory E-Verify violates the Constitution. More importantly, requiring every American “show their papers” in order to obtain federal permission to hold a job is incompatible with a free society. Mandatory E-Verify will also deprive Americans of job opportunities through false positives while providing politicians and others with opportunities to use the information in the database to harass their political and other enemies. Furthermore, there is no way a future Congress can be restrained from increasing the uses of the E-Verify system or syncing it to other databases to complete a massive, universal data system that could seal the transformation of America into a total surveillance state.
Read Paul’s complete comments for the subcommittee here.
Mandatory E-Verify is one of many “tough on illegal immigration” policy proposals in the US Congress. With new Senators and Representatives taking office a month back, it looks like another attempt at passing “immigration reform,” much like the attempt in 2013, is underway. Certainly, the border-industrial complex is playing a major role behind the scenes this time as well.
In February of 2013, Paul warned in an editorial of the potential of “turning the US into a police state in order to fight a hyped up illegal immigration ‘crisis.’” In the editorial Paul also describes mandatory E-Verify as “an East Germany-like program that creates a massive federal database of every American citizen and notes whether or not they are permitted to work.” Read Paul’s editorial here.
