Community Corner
Help get Town of Cumberland to use E-Verify!
Rhode Island is among the nation’s leaders in unemployment. Nationwide, our citizens lucky enough to find jobs must work for lower wages and benefits as a result of the presence of a readily available, cheap, illegal immigrant labor force. If you’re out of work you should be screaming for E-Verify!
We need to demand that our city, town, and state government officials require the utilization of E-Verify. We need to know we are doing everything reasonable to ensure that every scarce job in America is going to someone living in our state and country legally. There is no reason to wait, and every reason NOT to wait. Our citizens deserve better service from our “public servants.” We don’t need or want rhetoric, delay, political correctness, pandering, sympathy, empathy, or apathy. We have seen, and continue to see, the error of this approach.
Twenty-two cities and towns across the State of Rhode Island are listed as users of the (free and easy-to-use) e-verify system. Sadly, Cumberland and Woonsocket are not included on that list. Let’s hope OUR leaders soon rectify that situation.
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Our leaders must also be aware that we are living in very litigious times. It is not beyond possibility that a citizen might sue government for negligence if it didn’t do all it could to avoid hiring an illegal worker and protect taxpayer dollars. Any citizen, perhaps someone out-of-work, might sue any employer, private or public, who is not utilizing e-verify and has employed a non-legal worker. One might claim that not using e-verify displays a willingness to employ illegal workers.
While e-verify isn’t perfect, it is the best tool we have available to verify work eligibility and it is getting better all the time. At the Federal level it is used on all federal employees and on the employees of most entities doing contract work with the federal government. All employers, especially State and local government entities, should follow this example. We need to start using common sense and get rid of the nonsense.