The socio-economic impact of E-Verify in an era of globalization: A scoping review and analyses of workforce outcomes

Galvin, Kathleen Casey

The University of Utah, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014. 3643064.

Latinos have accounted for 56% of the Nation's population growth in the past decade and in March of 2012 there were 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. Fifty-two percent (6.05 million) of these immigrants were of Mexican origin and 8 million of the total number of undocumented immigrants were/are part of the Nation's workforce, representing 5.2% of all workers. In response to these statistics and a public perception that foreign workers are "taking" jobs away from American workers, President Obama has said that immigration reform is a "top priority" for his administration. Mandating an electronic employment eligibility verification system is a key component (sometimes referred to as the "lynchpin') of immigration reform efforts. E-Verify is an electronic employment eligibility verification system that aims to deter unauthorized immigration and increase job security for U.S. citizens by curbing unauthorized employment. This dissertation followed a Multiple Article Path (MAP) format and resulted in three articles for publication. The overarching goal of this work was to contribute to the literature in a greatly under-researched area of immigration policy, workplace enforcement and specifically, E-Verify. In this dissertation, I first conducted a scoping review to map empirical knowledge currently available on E-Verify. Subsequently, I conducted two quasi-experiments utilizing interrupted time series designs to evaluate how variation in implementation of E-Verify influenced key workforce indicators. The overarching policy recommendation that I assert, based on the work of this dissertation, is that as social workers we must involve ourselves in political processes and advocate for inclusive rather than exclusive immigration policies - this research supports that when immigration policies are inclusive, everyone is better off.