The effect of employer enrolment in E-Verify on low-skilled U.S. workers

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Abstract

U.S. employers can check whether the workers they hire are legally eligible for employment using E-Verify, a free electronic system run by the federal government. We use confidential data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to provide the first examination of whether increases in employer enrolment in the E-Verify system affect employment and earnings among workers who are particularly likely to be unauthorized, namely Hispanic non-naturalized immigrants who have not completed high school, and their U.S.-citizen counterparts. We find evidence of negative effects on likely unauthorized immigrant men but positive effects on women. We find little evidence of effects on U.S. natives. These results are robust to instrumenting for endogenous employer enrolment with state laws that require some or all employers to use the E-Verify system. The results are consistent with a household model of labour supply among unauthorized immigrants.

Publication Title

Applied Economics Letters

First Page

1

Last Page

4

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1080/13504851.2020.1788706

ISSN

13504851

E-ISSN

14664291

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