In the February 22 presidential debate, Mitt Romney singled out Arizona's E-Verify program as a model for the nation. The Public Policy Institute of California said that the 2010 SB 1070 law was probably the reason that 92,000, or 17 percent of Arizona's Hispanic non-citizen population -- most of them probably illegals -- left the state. Magnus Lofstrom, coauthor of the study, said that most who stayed increasingly shifted into a shadow economy, nearly doubling the self-employment rate among non-citizen Hispanics in Arizona. Lofstrom believes the shadow, or informal economy would grow significantly if a national E-Verify system were established. An informal economy increase is much more likely than a massive movement toward self-deportation.
Lofstrom sees an increase in the informal economy as resulting in lower tax revenue, higher poverty rates and an increase in employer abuse.
Another problem in E-Verify is that according to a government-commissioned study, E-Verify only flags illegal immigrants half the time, because it can't detect when a worker is using documents that belong to someone else. Mill Romney supports a biometric ID card but universal ID cards have run into a lot of political opposition in the past.
Arizona does have a state-wide system to make sure businesses are using E-Verify: it relies on individual citizens reporting businesses who break the law. Thus far, only three businesses have been prosecuted. Business owners are worried that E-Verify's high error rate leaves them open to prosecution.
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