This election season, an anti-immigration nonprofit with ties to hate groups is pushing conservative lawmakers to expand a controversial worker surveillance tool that critics say is discriminatory and harms businesses and workers.
At a recent American Legislative Exchange Council gathering of conservative lawmakers and corporate lobbyists, the nonprofit NumbersUSA hosted a workshop promoting E-Verify, a government website used to screen workers’ immigration status. Mandating that employers use E-Verify would allow “state legislatures to take control of [the immigration] situation,” said Andrew Good, NumbersUSA’s state government relations director, adding that “Illegal immigration costs the taxpayers in your states billions of dollars” and “you don’t know who is touching your food.”
While NumbersUSA is now a free-standing entity, the organization was originally established in 1996 as part of a foundation run by John Tanton, a white nationalist who wrote that “a European American majority” is required to maintain American culture. Tanton also founded several organizations designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremists nationwide, and once said the founder of NumbersUSA was his “heir apparent.”
Experts say the platforming of NumbersUSA and its sweeping worker surveillance push by the powerful American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which purports to be dedicated to “limited government, free markets, and federalism,” illustrates the GOP’s increasingly extreme position on immigration — at the expense of Republicans’ public commitments to small government and private enterprise.
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“ALEC sort of toes the line of what might be working in the broader Republican Party or right wing,” said David Armiak, research director at the progressive watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, which runs the information clearinghouse ALEC Exposed.
This push for E-Verify aligns with mandates set by Project 2025, a nearly 900-page initiative for a second Trump presidency that seeks to reshape the federal government. The document argues that state or local governments receiving federal emergency aid should be required to use E-Verify to prove their employees’ documentation status. Additionally, the document states that “Congress should also permanently authorize E-Verify and make it mandatory.”
In June, before being tapped as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and other Republican and conservative senators introduced the Mandatory E-Verify Act of 2024, which would demand employers nationwide use the vetting service. Trump has also repeatedly pledged to deport all undocumented immigrants in the U.S., thus conducting the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
E-Verify, a United States Department of Homeland Security-run website that allows companies to check individuals’ information with government databases to confirm their “employment eligibility,” is currently used by nearly one million employers nationwide. 10 states require most or all of their businesses to use E-Verify when hiring new employees, and 12 states require public employers to use the online system.
NumbersUSA wants to significantly expand that number.
“The federal government has eschewed its responsibility on immigration,” Good said at the ALEC conference this July, where lobbyists met with lawmakers to craft “model bills” on topics like tax policy and school security that can then be introduced in state legislatures. “States need to pick up the slack and ensure they are protecting their own states, their own citizens.”
NumbersUSA did not respond to a request for comment.
But E-Verify has a spotty record, and even some conservative groups have attacked the system over the burdens it puts on businesses and workers. Most worryingly, say immigration experts, E-Verify can be used to penalize people from some countries and not others — which could be why an operation with hate group ties is actively promoting it this election season.
“What I think an organization like NumbersUSA is really doing is [saying] ‘We’re going to prefer some Americans over other Americans,’” said University of California, Los Angeles immigration law professor Hiroshi Motomura. “And that’s really troubling to me, because a lot of it is really based on matters of race and language.”
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A Controversial Website
E-Verify evolved out of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and prohibits employers from knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants. From this act came the I-9 form, which every new employee must now fill out to demonstrate they are eligible to work in the U.S.
The online platform adds an extra step to the hiring process in which employers must enter workers’ I-9 information into E-Verify so it can be cross-referenced with Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security databases to ensure workers have proper documentation to work in the country.
But the costs of implementing E-Verify, combined with questionable benefits, has earned the website enemies even on the right. In the early 2010s, researchers estimated that a nationwide E-Verify mandate would cost small businesses $2.6 billion, set taxpayers back $1 billion, and increase the federal budget deficit by $30 billion.
“The program embodies the ‘papers please’ mentality that in more innocent days signaled a sinister tyranny to any decent American,” noted the libertarian publication Reason.
And the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank that’s part of a right-wing dark money network dedicated to mass government deregulation, has slammed E-Verify for poor implementation rates, minimal impact on illegal immigration, and its history of accidentally blocking legal workers from jobs.
“Through erroneous non-confirmations, E‑Verify has harmed nearly three quarters of a million legal workers and has not stopped illegal employment,” noted a 2019 Cato report.
Others are critical of E-Verify for another reason: It can be used to discriminate against certain noncitizen workers.
Although the Department of Justice states that employers must use the same E-Verify process “regardless of an employee’s citizenship, immigration status, or national origin,” there is no confirmation that organizations are using E-Verify for all of their new hires, or just those of a certain race or from certain countries.
“I think we should hesitate to accept without more evidence the notion that everyone is targeted [by E-Verify], Motomura said.
With that in mind, employers could be using E-Verify to discriminate against certain employees.
“E-Verify represents a shift toward surveillance and employer empowerment against workers, but also against people who might look foreign from [employers’] point of view,” said Motomura.
Plus, using E-Verify to bar undocumented immigrants from working ignores the fact that this population continues to serve as an integral part of the U.S. economy, said Victor Narro, a project director at the University of California, Los Angeles Labor Center.
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The 11 million unauthorized individuals in the country comprise a quarter of all agricultural workers, almost 20 percent of maintenance and construction workers, and 12 percent of food preparation workers. They also paid almost $100 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy think tank.
It’s why the American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural lobbying group representing millions of farmers, is currently opposed to E-Verify mandates.
“Requiring agricultural employers to use E-Verify without assuring that a workable guest worker program is in place could have a significant, negative impact on U.S. farm production, not only threatening the livelihoods of many farmers and ranchers in labor-intensive agriculture but jeopardizing as well the health of the rural economy,” notes the powerful lobbying group on its website.
“Many industries already rely on the immigrant workforce, and many undocumented immigrant workers,” said Narro. “The focus should be on integration — how to integrate them into the system… it has to be a system where undocumented workers have a path to legalization and citizenship.”
“You Don’t Know Who Is Touching Your Food”
NumbersUSA is part of what is referred to as “The Tanton Network” — a cluster of anti-immigrant organizations that were funded for decades by the white nationalist Tanton, who passed away in 2019. Although NumbersUSA founder Beck has tried to distance himself from the network over the years, Tanton — who the Southern Poverty Law Center called the “racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement” — reportedly referred to Beck as a “dear friend” and “employee.”
NumbersUSA and Tanton’s Center for Immigration Studies have also forged alliances with Hungarian organizations that are “similarly concerned that immigrants are a blight on established societies,” according to a report by Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a group dedicated to stopping far-right extremism movements.
Additionally, in November 2023, the conservative Hungarian university, Mathias Corvinus Collegium, announced the formation of the International Network for Immigration Research, which includes the Centers for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA, and the right-wing Israeli Immigration Policy Center.
The Center for Immigration Studies also served on the advisory board for Project 2025, and six representatives of the organization are credited with helping write the manifesto.
NumbersUSA has been advocating for E-Verify since its inception: Starting in 1997 when the government launched the online pilot program, the nativist organization worked closely with Texas Rep. Lamar Smith (R) — a lawmaker with openly anti-immigration views — to push for the mandatory use of E-Verify by employers, according to the group’s website.
Between 2010 and 2012, NumbersUSA claimed it helped pass “immigration enforcement laws, including E-Verify mandates for most businesses” in states including Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama.
In recent years, the organization has revved up its E-Verify efforts.
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Last year, NumbersUSA presented an exhibit on E-Verify at the National Conference of State Legislatures’ 2023 Legislative Summit, where lawmakers meet to discuss a wide range of issues and policies. During their exhibition, which was framed as “part of NumbersUSA’s expanding push on states to take action to combat the huge increase in illegal immigration,” the group applauded Rep. Kiyan Michael (R-Fla.) for championing a sweeping anti-immigration bill that requires medium- and large-sized employers to use E-Verify.
This year, they have continued this effort by taking the stage at ALEC — a “pay to play” organization made up of conservative lawmakers and private corporations.
“Behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line,” the Center for Media and Democracy watchdog wrote about the organization on their website, ALEC Exposed. “Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations — without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills.”
On the first day of the ALEC conference this July, NumbersUSA hosted a workshop titled “Helping Business Owners and State Leaders Build a Legal Workforce: A Legislative Primer on E-Verify,” which emphasized the danger of undocumented immigrants in the workforce.
Unauthorized immigrants are “getting jobs in agriculture, you don’t know who is touching your food,” Good, NumberUSA’s state government relations director, told a room full of legislators.
“Illegal immigration costs the taxpayers in your states billions of dollars,” Good added. “Suddenly you get an influx of individuals, what happens? Oh, right, you have to educate everybody, you have to make sure that everyone has proper housing, that everyone has proper health care, that there is enough police and emergency medical and fire [services] to go around, and that costs money.”
Good presented E-Verify as a potential solution, while only briefly mentioning the critiques leveled at the system.
“You have the ability as state legislatures to take control of that situation in many ways, but one of these ways is by mandating E-Verify,” Good said.
A Party Effort
The push for employers’ E-Verify mandates isn’t just coming from NumbersUSA.
This February, the Iowa Senate passed a Republican-sponsored bill that would require employers to use the E-Verify electronic system to screen workers’ immigration status before hiring. Four months later, Vance and other Republican and conservative senators introduced the Mandatory E-Verify Act of 2024.
“By requiring all employers to use E-Verify, our legislation would ensure that businesses only hire legal workers — eliminating a key driver of illegal immigration and protecting jobs for hardworking Americans,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a news release.
Republican lawmakers in Arizona are also pushing a bill that would mandate employers use E-Verify or else face felony charges and fines of $10,000 per undocumented employee. The legislation passed the state’s House and Senate this year and will appear on the state ballot this November.
“We may not be able to do the federal government’s job, but we can stop Arizona from becoming like California,” bill sponsor and state Rep. Ben Toma (R) said in past remarks. “Our message to illegal immigrants is simple: If you want to take advantage of Americans, go somewhere else.”
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This pressure for E-Verify mandates comes at a ripe time for Republicans, as roughly six in 10 Trump supporters say there should be a national effort to deport undocumented immigrants, and four in 10 say undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to stay in the country legally.
However, such perspectives ignore the fact that the U.S. has and always will experience unauthorized immigration, said Motomura from the University of California, Los Angeles.
NumbersUSA is “assuming a world in which the whole function of immigration restrictions is to build something of a fortress around this country, and immigration law is about protecting us insiders from those outsiders,” Motomura said. “The fact of the matter is, that’s not the country we live in.”
