08
Nov

Rhode Island Governor-Elect Defies National Trend Toward Enforcement; Promises To Rescind E-Verify

Published on November 8th, 2010

In a Friday news conference Governor-elect Lincoln Chafee held with the Rhode Island NBC affiliate, he announced that upon taking office he would rescind the E-Verify provision signed in 2008 by his predecessor Don Carcierri. Said Chafee: “I’ll take an oath of office to enforce the laws, but that extra step of E-Verify, I’m going to repeal that and send a message to the Latino community [that] we’re all together, and if you’re breaking the law, you’ll pay the consequences,” Chafee called E-In a Friday news conference Governor-elect Lincoln Chafee held with the Rhode Island NBC affiliate, he announced that upon taking office he would rescind the E-verify provision signed in 2008 by his predecessor Don Carcierri. Said Chafee: “I’ll take an oath of office to enforce the laws, but that extra step of E-Verify, I’m going to repeal that and send a message to the Latino community [that] we’re all together, and if you’re breaking the law, you’ll pay the consequences,” Chafee called E-verify divisive and unnecessary. On one point, at least, Chafee is correct. E-verify is divisive. The law divides people who are legally authorized to work in the United States from those who are not. Unfortunately, Chafee is well known as a bad guy to proponents of enforcing immigration law. During his term in the United State Senate which he served as a Republican, Chafee compiled one of the worst immigration records in Congress. Chafee consistently, along with his then-Senate colleague Jack Reed and Rhode Island U.S. Representatives Sheldon Whitehouse and Patrick Kennedy, voted in favor of more inducements for illegal immigration and against tighter border security. What’s curious about Chafee’s announcement is that Rhode Island is in such a dire budget and unemployment crisis that his first objective should be to protect American workers, specifically from illegal alien job poaching. Earlier this month, a Moody’s senior analyst Andres Carbacho-Burgos predicted that Rhode Island would lag the rest of the nation in terms of its economic recovery and would not regain its normal 5.5 percent unemployment level until 2015. After peaking at 12.7 percent in December 2009, Rhode Island’s unemployment rate dipped slightly to 11.5 percent in September. Robert J. Langlais, assistant director for Labor Market Information with the state Department of Labor and Training said Rhode Island has lost a total of 47,900 jobs over the 39 months from its peak employment level of 496,500 in January 2007. That represents a 9.6 percent decline. Chafee’s bold move to end E-Verify is also unusual in light of his narrow margin of victory. In last Tuesday’s election which Chafee ran as an Independent (he switched from Democrat to run for governor and had been, as I noted above, a Republican) he received only 36 percent of the vote versus 34 percent for his Republican challenger John Robitaille. Given his immigration advocacy it’s unlikely that Chafee will change his mind about E-Verify. What’s more probable is that under the direction of an enforcement minded Congress headed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, Chafee will have to fall in line with other states on mandatory E-Verify if the SAVE Act becomes law.

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