Alex Nowrasteh [1] of the Koch family-linked Competitive Enterprise Institute offers "E-Verify is a Spectacular Failure and Should be Abandoned" [2], referring to this recent report. It contains several curious passages, such as:

While it cannot identify illegal/undocumented immigrants 54%, E-Verify could accomplish one thing: ossification of U.S. labor markets. With the official unemployment rate hovering around 10%, burdening employers and employees with additional workplace regulations like E-Verify will make matters worse.

1. Simply checking someone through a website isn't going to "ossify" much of anything, since it's accurate for legal workers 93% of the time. For almost any job there will be far more applicants than openings, meaning that those who don't pass will in most cases simply be replaced by someone who does. That's bad news for the person who didn't pass, but Nowrasteh isn't calling to improve the system but to scrap it entirely.

2. If Nowrasteh were concerned about the fate of American workers and high unemployment, one would think he'd want to reduce the numbers of illegal aliens in the labor supply; what he's proposing wouldn't do that and would further incentivize illegal immigration.

Additionally, making the right to work contingent upon government permission will do more to Europeanize U.S. labor markets, where unemployment hovers around 10% normally, than any other proposed regulation.

The "right to work" is already "contingent upon government permission"; it's been illegal to hire illegal aliens for quite a number of years now, and nothing in EVerify is designed to affect the right to work for citizens and legal workers. The European bit is a non sequitur.

If that's not enough, he also says:

But even if you think that illegal/undocumented immigration is a serious problem, E-Verify fails to solve the problem.

Illegal immigration is, of course, a very serious problem. Among many other things:

* it's an indicator of massive government and elite corruption;
* it's promoted through misleading media reports that deprive people of the correct information they need to make informed decisions;
* it represents a light, soft form of war against low-wage Americans, increasing competition for low-wage jobs;
* it raise costs for the middle class;
* it reduces the political power of American citizens, giving foreign citizens and foreign governments power inside the U.S. and affecting congressional apportionment;
* it increases freeway congestion and school crowding;
* it's done without the assent of the vast majority of Americans;
* it decreases respect for the law;
* it leads to other crimes such as identity theft;
* and much, much more.

The standard libertarian answer to the above is to pretend that if we just made illegal immigration legal the problem would be solved. Not only would the vast majority of Americans completely oppose such open borders (meaning that a libertarian scheme would have to be imposed through force), but it wouldn't solve the problems but simply make them worse.

If, despite the above, you still trust Nowrasteh's judgment on the immigration issue, please leave a detailed comment and I'll try to change your mind.

[1] He appears to be quite the "Kochtopus Kid", having attended the Koch family-linked George Mason University.
[2] openmarket.org/2010/02/25/
e-verfiy-is-a-spectacular-failure-and-should-be-abandoned