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- Utah businesses lobbied against lowering the E-Verify threshold from 150 to 15 employees.
- The debate highlighted concerns about identity theft but emphasized the burden on small businesses.
SALT LAKE CITY – Seventy-five years of working the land in central Utah has made the economics of immigration frustratingly clear for Robert McMullin.
If the federal government continues to fail to reform legal pathways for foreign workers, his nearly 100-year-old orchard, currently being run by its fourth generation of family farmers, won't live long enough to see its fifth generation take charge.
"We'd have to just tear out our trees and do something else," McMullin said. "We just wouldn't be in business."
Over the years, McMullin Orchards, located just north of Santaquin, has come to rely on 40 H-2A seasonal workers from Mexico as the "backbone" of their fruit-growing operation because of the difficulty with finding local employees.
But rising overhead costs have created the toughest conditions for McMullin's farm in his lifetime, he said, and one misplaced move by the state Legislature could spell the end of its centurylong run.
Practical economic realities for businesses like McMullin's were cited by Utah lawmakers as their central reason for rejecting a return to the state's previous standard for verifying the immigration status of new employees this legislative session.
Last week, members of the House Business, Labor, and Commerce Committee voted for the second time not to advance a bill that would require companies with at least 15 employees to use the federal immigration verification tool E-Verify — down from the current threshold of 150 employees.
The bipartisan blockade against the policy, which was originally included in Utah's "compromise on immigration" 15 years ago, came after a concerted effort by the agriculture and construction industries to paint the bill as an ineffective means of reducing illegal activity that would have disastrous outcomes for companies already struggling because of workforce shortfalls.
The consensus among many lawmakers and lobbyists on Capitol Hill seemed to be that — public safety concerns aside — putting pressure on private businesses to enforce federal immigration policy is the wrong approach.
While McMullin said he never hires unauthorized workers because he can't risk a mid-season raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he still bristles at the idea that business owners trying to make ends meet should be tasked with tracking how prospective employees entered the country.
"There are times when we have left fruit in the field because we have not had enough labor to harvest it in a timely manner," McMullin said. "It is not my job to have to regulate the people that come to my front door to work."
Can E-Verify fight fraud?
Rep. Neil Walter, R-St. George, who sponsored HB214, Employer Verification Amendments, thinks the debate over his bill drifted away from the core issues of reducing identity theft and setting equal standards for companies.
"My feeling was that we ought to be putting the security interests of our citizens first, and we ought to be putting our employers and employees ... on an even playing field," Walter told the Deseret News.
Walter's bill would have increased the number of businesses that must use a status verification system to check the legal working status of new employees from companies with more than 150 employees to include those with as few as 15 employees.
The bill originally brought the threshold down to five employees, which was amended to 15 and then 50 in a last-minute effort to gain support. It would have provided companies with more than a year to become compliant before they would be required to use E-Verify for new hires.
Walter's proposal also would have reaffirmed that workers who use fraudulent IDs for the purpose of obtaining employment are subject to criminal prosecution under Utah's identity fraud statutes.
There are currently hundreds of Utah children whose government ID is being used by an adult to receive wages and thousands of Social Security numbers being used by three to 10 last names for employment purposes, according to Utah Department of Workforce Services data.
As with other lawmakers who voted against Walter's bill, Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, agrees that identity theft for employment is a real problem in Utah. But he felt that without an enforcement mechanism, the law would hurt good actors while leaving bad actors untouched.
"I'm concerned that we're going to have this bill that's a burden on law-abiding businesses and then it's not going to accomplish anything," Thurston told the Deseret News.
The arguments against Walter's bill were the same arguments made in 2022 to raise the threshold to 150 employees, Thurston said. Namely, that requiring small businesses to use E-Verify does little to deter immigrants from seeking employment unlawfully and adds extra bureaucratic steps for employers dealing with inflation and a tight labor market.
Thurston said that adding penalties in the bill for non-compliant businesses would make it more effective but less politically palatable. That was Walter's original intention but he quickly realized the change "would have guaranteed that the bill failed."
What immigration policy do businesses want?
For Spencer Gibbons, the CEO of the Utah Farm Bureau and the owner of Gibbons Brothers Dairy in Lewiston, the E-Verify debate puts business owners in a nearly impossible situation.
While Gibbons does not think E-Verify is burdensome for businesses — the online program simply requires members to enter an employee's information from an I9 tax form — he does believe that requiring small businesses to comply with E-Verify would shrink the "labor pool down to virtually zero" in some cases.
"You put employers in the position of they have to be the policeman and stand the risk of not having the labor to run their business," Gibbons said. "I can tell you that there are not a lot of people that live in this country lining up to go and milk cows."
