What The Hell America!

In a half-empty committee room in late April, one of Texas’ most powerful Republican state senators pitched legislation that would make it harder for immigrants in the country illegally to get jobs.

Her bill would require all employers in the state to use a free federal computer system, known as E-Verify, that quickly confirms whether someone has authorization to work in the United States. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham ticked off a handful of Republican-led states that mandate the program for all private companies and listed others that require it for most over a certain size. Yet Texas, which prides itself on being the nation’s toughest on illegal immigration, instructs only state agencies and sexually oriented businesses to use it.

“E-Verify is the most functional and cost-effective method the state of Texas can implement to stem the flow of illegal immigration, or those that are here not legally, to ensure that U.S. citizens and those able to work in the state of Texas are the ones who get the Texas jobs,” Kolkhorst told fellow senators, reminding them that the Business and Commerce Committee passed her nearly identical bill two years ago. (That proposal never made it to the Senate floor.)

No one spoke against the new legislation. Only one committee member, a Democrat, questioned it, asking if supporters would also favor an immigrant guest worker program. A handful of labor representatives called the bill a bipartisan priority, testifying that too many employers cut corners by hiring workers illegally at lower wages. The bill went on to sail through the committee and the Senate.

But then, like dozens of E-Verify bills over the last decade, the legislation died.

Texas’ top Republican leaders have built a political brand on the state’s hard-line stance against illegal immigration, pouring billions of dollars into Gov. Greg Abbott’s state border security initiative, including funding construction of a border wall and deploying state police to arrest migrants on a newly created offense for trespassing. This session, lawmakers voted to require most sheriff’s offices to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

Yet again and again the state’s conservative Legislature has refused to take what some Republicans call the single most crucial step to preventing immigrants from coming and staying here illegally: mandating E-Verify to make it more difficult for them to work.

Since 2013, GOP lawmakers in Texas have introduced more than 40 E-Verify bills. Most tried to require the program for government entities and their contractors, but about a dozen attempted to expand the system to private employers in some capacity. With few exceptions, like mandating E-Verify for certain state contractors, Republican legislators declined to pass the overwhelming majority of those proposals.

This session, lawmakers filed about half a dozen bills attempting to require private companies to use the program. Kolkhorst’s legislation was the only one to make it out of either legislative chamber but eventually died because the state House did not take it up.

Given Texas leaders’ rhetoric on the border, it is a “glaring omission” not to more broadly require E-Verify as other GOP-led states have done, said Lynden Melmed, former chief counsel under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that oversees E-Verify. At least nine majority Republican states — including Arizona, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina — require that most, if not all, private companies use the system. Abbott has frequently positioned Texas as harsher on immigration than each of them.

Still, that a private mandate made it further this session than ever before may illustrate the growing conflict in Texas between the pro-business side of the state’s GOP and Republicans who want to look tougher on immigration, said Melmed, who was a former special counsel on the issue to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.

The resistance to E-Verify isn’t just about Texas Republicans’ reluctance to regulate business, Melmed said. It’s about how such a system could impact the state’s labor supply and economy.

An estimated 1.3 million Texas workers, more than 8% of the state’s work force, are here illegally, according to a 2023 analysis of U.S. census data by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. About a quarter of all construction workers in Texas lack legal status, for example, and the industry faces a critical labor shortage as a need for housing booms. Likewise, the state’s understaffed agricultural, restaurant and elder care sectors rely on workers here illegally.

“If you got serious about applying [E-Verify], you would create even worse problems” with labor shortages, said Bill Hammond, a GOP former state lawmaker who once led the Texas Association of Business. “Do you want to go to a restaurant and use paper plates because no one will wash dishes?”

Texas’ political leaders know this, Hammond said, but they don’t want to publicly acknowledge it.

A spokesperson for Abbott refused to say whether the governor supports mandating the program for private companies. However, when running for governor more than a decade ago, Abbott acknowledged that businesses had complained about instituting the system. At the time, he touted federal statistics that E-Verify was 99.5% accurate. State agencies, he said, could serve as a model before legislators imposed it on companies.

A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who as a senator unsuccessfully pushed legislation to hold employers accountable for hiring immigrants here illegally, did not return requests for comment, nor did a spokesperson for Speaker Dustin Burrows explain why the House refused to take up E-Verify. Kolkhorst declined repeated interview requests on her legislation.

State Sen. Charles Schwertner, a Georgetown Republican who authored the first E-Verify bill that the Texas Legislature approved, said in an interview that his 2015 legislation did not go as far as he would have liked. He said that he agreed with Kolkhort’s private-company mandate.

“We need to enforce our immigration laws, both at the border and the interior of Texas, and E-Verify is an important component,” Schwertner said.

Some GOP lawmakers who pushed the issue this session faced “deafening silence” from many colleagues and impacted industries, said state Rep. Carl Tepper, a Lubbock Republican who filed two E-Verify bills.

Lawmakers and industry groups have a “misguided fear” about losing a portion of their workforce who are here illegally and whom they feel dependent on, he said. Although immigration enforcement is overseen by Congress, Tepper said that the state should do what it can to prevent such workers from coming to Texas by making it more difficult to hire them.

Even one of the state’s most influential conservative think tanks has supported more incremental E-Verify legislation, such as extending the state mandate to local governments. Doing so would be an “easier win” than requiring it for businesses, said Selene Rodriguez, a campaign director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Still, she said that the organization generally supports a broader mandate and is disappointed that Kolkhorst’s legislation failed.

E-Verify has been tricky for her group, Rodriguez acknowledged, because lawmakers have done so little over the years that it has had to prioritize what is “attainable.”

“Given the Trump agenda, that he won so widely, we thought maybe there’d be more appetite to advance it,” Rodriguez said. “But that wasn’t the case.”

She blamed “behind-the scenes” lobbying from powerful industry groups, particularly in agriculture and construction, as well as lawmakers who worry how supporting the proposal would influence reelection prospects.

A dozen prominent state industry groups declined to comment to ProPublica and The Texas Tribune on their stances relating to E-Verify.

E-Verify supporters admit the system is not a panacea. The computer program can confirm only whether identification documents are valid, not whether they actually belong to the prospective employee, and as a result a black market for such documents has surged. Employers, too, can game the system by contracting out work to smaller companies, which in many states are exempt from E-Verify mandates.

Even when states adopt these, most lack strong enforcement. Texas legislators have never tasked an agency with ensuring all employers comply. South Carolina, which has among the toughest enforcement, randomly audits businesses to see if they are using E-Verify, said Madeline Zavodny, a University of North Florida economics professor who studied the program for a 2017 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas report. But South Carolina does not check whether companies actually hired immigrants here illegally, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Some states have carve-outs for small companies or certain employers that often rely on undocumented labor. North Carolina, for example, exempts temporary seasonal workers.

Immigrants here illegally contribute billions to the economy, said Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Much of the rhetoric over the issue is “using immigration as a wedge issue to rile up the base of voters who are concerned about cultural change, but at the same time not wanting to disrupt the economy too much.”

Expanding E-Verify, she said, is “not really in anybody’s interest.”