Reid Feels Heat from Back Home

A big hat tip to www.fairus.com about Senator Harry Reid's quest to block E-Verify, a useful tool in immigration enforcement.

Reid Feels Heat from Back Home
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was singlehandedly responsible for blocking both the inclusion of a reauthorization of E-Verify in the Senate’s version of the massive economic stimulus bill and a requirement that companies benefiting from stimulus money use the system to ensure that they hire only legal U.S. workers. Along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Reid made sure that those provisions in the bill passed by the House of Representatives were stripped from the final version sent to President Obama.
E-Verify is a federal program that allows employers to instantly verify the Social Security numbers and work eligibility of new employees. It is currently used by more than 100,000 employers nationwide, and has a near perfect 99.6 percent accuracy rate.
The majority leader’s actions may have been popular with cheap labor interest groups and other illegal immigration advocacy organizations, but they are radically out of step with the views and the interests of Sen. Reid’s Nevada constituents. According to a Zogby International poll commissioned by FAIR, 83 percent of Nevadans support reauthorization of E-Verify, and 78 percent said that companies receiving federal stimulus dollars should be required to use the program. Nevada has the highest per capita number of illegal residents and, at 9.4 percent, Nevada’s unemployment rate is one of the highest in the nation.
As part of FAIR’s core mission of educating the American public about the impact of mass immigration, the organization undertook a multi-faceted effort to bring Sen. Reid’s actions to the attention of Nevadans. In addition to release of the Zogby poll (full results can be seen on FAIR’s web site, www.fairus.org) FAIR published a report, The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Nevadans (see sidebar), published an open letter to Sen. Reid in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, conducted a statewide media blitz, and organized a public rally outside the senator’s Las Vegas office.
With the assistance of local talk radio host Heidi Harris, whose KDWN program is one of the most listened to in Nevada, the FAIR-organized rally brought some 150 activists outside Reid’s Las Vegas office on February 25 to protest his refusal to protect workers in his own state and across the nation by including the E-Verify provisions in the stimulus bill. In addition to the activists who gathered outside Reid’s office, the protesters, waving flags and carrying placards, received enthusiastic support from passing motorists.
The protest rally was only part of the message Sen. Reid heard and saw that day. Earlier, FAIR’s national field director, Susan Tully, joined with a contingent of Nevada voters to present Sen. Reid’s Las Vegas staff with a copy of a petition addressed to President Obama signed by over 16,000 Americans urging that E-Verify be maintained and expanded. That same day, the lead story in the local news section of the Review-Journal featured coverage of FAIR’s statewide opinion poll and details about how much illegal immigration is costing Nevadans.
Despite the enormous inside-the-Beltway advantage that special interests promoting mass immigration and amnesty have, FAIR has repeatedly demonstrated that arming the public with timely and reliable information can overcome those odds. As we move through what promises to be a very challenging year, FAIR will continue to employ all available means to keep the American public informed and to ensure that they have a voice in this important national debate.