This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 4th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

E-Verify may be an intrusion of the federal government into deciding who can work for whom in the United States,

but it's only the latest one that from Alex Narasta a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

Well, we've seen in Arizona since 2008, every employer has to use E-Verify for every employee that they hire. And what we've seen is somewhere between only about 50 and 60 percent on average

each year of hires are actually run through the system.

So the result you've seen is a lot of... of hires are actually run through the system.

So the result you've seen is a lot of employers just ignore it and hire a large proportion

of their employees in the black market.

So what are the penalties for not using the system if it's required in Arizona?

So there aren't penalties on the books for ignoring it by itself, but what it does, by using

eVerify, you get sort of a safe harbor provision so that if you hired an illegal

immigrant in the state you don't necessarily lose all of your business licenses.

But if you do hire knowingly or intentionally an illegal immigrant on the second occasion you essentially lose all your business licenses and they force you out of business.

So the bar set for you to lose your business licenses is knowing that this person was not

authorized to work in the United States. Yeah and then hiring them on top of that

so it's quite an extreme punishment and it's not

surprising that it's not that enforced because the punishment is so high I mean

Voltaire tells a story in pre-revolutionary France where they passed a law saying anybody who stole

like expensive towels from the rich would be put to death and as a result of

that the amount of criminality associated you know the number of towels stolen actually increased because nobody thought it was just to execute somebody for stealing towels.

So you got less enforcement and less reporting.

Okay, but eVerify of course is not the only way that we track who is authorized

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