Starting this week, Louisiana has joined more than a dozen states across the country to, at least, show that they are using the E-Verify program to keep from hiring illegal aliens.

The E-Verify program is a federal government run Internet database that verifies that an employee is legal and able to work in the U.S.

Gov. Jindal signed the law last year, House Bill 342, which requires that contractors submit an affidavit attesting that they used the program to verify employees legal status and that they have obtained similar verification from subcontractors starting at the first of the year.

 

If it’s found that they didn’t do so, they are forbidden to do work for the state or bid on any state work for three years.

Another new law, House Bill 646, went into effect in August and exempts employers and individuals from penalties should they be caught employing illegals if they can prove that they used E-Verify to hire the worker.

Employers who can produce documentation showing that a so-called undocumented worker has papers such as a U.S. birth certificate, naturalization papers or alien registration card is also exempt from penalties, which is kind of weird. I guess the provision is there to provide protection to employers who didn’t know an employee was illegal because he had fake paperwork.

The Louisiana laws is not as tough as laws that have been enacted in some other states that require employers to use E-Verify upfront instead of encouraging them to use it by exempting them from some penalties.

I spoke with Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) this morning, who referred me to studies that show that E-Verify has been around 95 percent effective when used in hiring practices.

The Louisiana laws are steps in the right direction and, thankfully, there isn’t anything that Eric Holder’s DOJ can do about them.

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s 2007 law that employers must use E-Verify–a federal program after-all—or risk having their business license revoked.

The court found that Arizona mandating E-Verify was in compliance with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, though Congress made the program voluntary at the national level.

The DOJ is now going after Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio on charges of racial profiling for arresting illegal Latinos and making them wear pink underwear.  Rev. Al ain’t too happy about Arpaio, either.

I wonder of it’s too late to talk the sheriff into throwing his hat in the ring for the Republican presidential race.

Besides Louisiana, states that have new E-Verify laws on the books include Alabama, Florida ( by executive order), Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.

A law in California prohibits requiring employers use the program.

Ya gotta love California–the state that always makes you feel better about living in Louisiana even during the worst months of hurricane season.

According to a study from FAIR, California, with a budget deficit of $14.4 billion in 2010-2011, was hit with an estimated $21.8 billion in annual expenditures on illegal aliens.

The report shows that Louisiana’s annual expenditure on illegals was $224 million last year. That’s when you add up medical, education, public assistance, law-enforcement and other things that forces our state to shell out dollars for illegals. It’s not chump change to a state with a $2 billion budget shortfall.

The study estimates the annual costs of illegal immigration at the federal, state and local level to be about $113 billion; nearly $29 billion at the federal level and $84 billion at the state and local level.

The report also reveals that taxes paid by illegals don’t come close to expenditures and, in any case, are misleading as an offset because over time unemployed and underemployed U.S. workers would replace illegal alien workers.

Key Findings

• Illegal immigration costs U.S. taxpayers about $113 billion a year at the federal, state and local level. The bulk of the costs — some $84 billion — are absorbed by state and local governments.
• The annual outlay that illegal aliens cost U.S. taxpayers is an average amount per native-headed household of $1,117. The fiscal impact per household varies considerably because the greatest share of the burden falls on state and local taxpayers whose burden depends on the size of the illegal alien population in that locality
• Education for the children of illegal aliens constitutes the single largest cost to taxpayers, at an annual price tag of nearly $52 billion. Nearly all of those costs are absorbed by state and local governments.
• At the federal level, about one-third of outlays are matched by tax collections from illegal aliens. At the state and local level, an average of less than 5 percent of the public costs associated with illegal immigration is recouped through taxes collected from illegal aliens.
• Most illegal aliens do not pay income taxes. Among those who do, much of the revenues collected are refunded to the illegal aliens when they file tax returns. Many are also claiming tax credits resulting in payments from the U.S. Treasury.

It looks as if Holder will have to sulk about Louisiana’s new laws, until he can find some way to drag state officials into court for racial profiling, like he’s doing in Arizona.

Holder’s kind of busy right now anyway, using race to make a federal case out of new state photo ID voter requirement laws to help Obama win re-election.