Elise Foley reports that Rep. Elton Gallegly, who was given the chairmanship of the House immigration subcommittee in a snub to Rep. Steve King, is planning on introducing a bill making E-Verify mandatory. E- Verify is the federal government's optional program for companies that want to ensure their employees are in the country legally:
House immigration subcommittee chairman Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.) said Thursday that he plans to introduce the bill to mandate the use of E-Verify within the next month. The program is already mandatory for government agencies and contractors and used voluntarily by nearly 250,000 businesses to check the legal status of potential hires. But Gallegly said he hopes making it a requirement for all U.S. enterprises will drive out illegal workers entirely.
As Foley notes, there are reasons the system hasn't been implemented nationally--it's both costly and prone to errors. There pro-business interests within the GOP will probably also be resistant to the proposal.
Still, we're beginning to see the Republican leadership's decision to pass over King being vindicated--Gallegly is no more moderate than King on immigration, he just lacks King's record of saying nutty things. So while he's proposing a large expansion of government that is an immigration restrictionists' dream, lefty groups don't have a long record of nasty remarks they can call on to discredit him as a crazy bigot who hates immigrants.
