One of the main things the United States has going for it is its relatively fluid labor market, relative, at least, to labor markets in much of Europe.

I wrote over 20 years ago about the Europeanization of the U.S. labor market, but I did not see E-Verify coming. E-Verify, if implemented nationwide, would be a system of work permits. If you started a new job, you would need the federal government to verify that you are legally allowed to have that job. How long would it be before the government started making judgements about who should be allowed to work? Convicted sexual predators, even those who were, say 19, and sleeping with a consensual 16-year-old, have to register for life and are told that they can’t live in certain parts of a city. Is it entirely inconceivable that some would ultimately be told that they can’t work?

Even if you don’t fear that, Cato Institute immigration policy analyst David Bier has shown how bad the E-Verify system is. It makes a lot of mistakes and those mistakes cause completely legal people to lose jobs. Here’s a snippet from his recent report:

The system has already proven remarkably ineffective at its intended purpose–keeping unauthorized workers away from jobs. In fact, in many cases, it does the opposite–keeping authorized workers away from employment. While many have focused on how making it mandatory would increase the number of these errors, E-Verify is already causing headaches and costing jobs for legal workers. In fact, from 2006 to 2016, legal workers had about 580,000 jobs held up due to E-Verify errors, and of these, they lost roughly 130,000 jobs entirely due to E-Verify mistakes.

So even if the feds never get really, really nasty to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, E-Verify would slow down adjustments and make our labor markets more rigid. Sad.