COLUMBUS, Ohio— Ohio senators are pushing forward with a plan that will be used to verify employment eligibility but may also help identify individuals who entered the country illegally.
“In part, this is because we see our southern border as a real problem,” Rep. D.J. Swearingen (R-Huron) explained.
House Bill 327 is sponsored by Swearingen and Rep. Scott Wiggam (R-Wayne County). The bill was reported out of committee 10-2, with one Republican and one Democrat voting against advancing it to the House floor.
The law would require employers with 75 or more employees, as well as non-residential construction contractors, to use E-Verify to validate employment eligibility.
“It’s a fairness issue,” Swearingen stated. “Those employers who are doing it the right way should be rewarded for hiring a legal workforce and those workers who are doing it the right way by being here legally to work should also be rewarded.”
E-Verify is an online government system that determines whether a person is eligible to work in their jurisdiction. The system flags people such as minors and non-American workers, and Swearingen stated that it should not add to employers’ workload.
“All the information you need to plug into the E-Verify system, employers already have on the i-9 form that they have for most employees,” he stated.
More than 18,000 Ohio firms have now enrolled in E-Verify, and the system has been used nearly 6,000 times in a single year. However, Democratic leadership stated that the bill still has some issues to be resolved.
“I think there’s concerns, specifically about how that can be operationalized, especially by some of the smaller contractors,” Ohio House Minority Leader Rep. Allison Russo (D-Upper Arlington) said.
The Ohio Contractors Association opposes the bill. The group declined to conduct an interview at this time because there are still too many shifting parts in the legislation.
However, in its committee evidence, the group stated that, while it does not support the hiring of undocumented workers, the legislation is inconsistent, noting, for example, that the residential construction industry is exempt from the measure.
“There could always be more changes in the process as we go through,” Swearingen stated. “But I think [the criticism] is a little unfair because this is really a broad group of construction workers that are going to be subject to the bill.”
The measure imposes penalties for noncompliance, including fines of up to $10,000 and a year’s disqualification from state contracts.
The bill is now awaiting a House floor vote; there are two House sessions remaining before members leave for the summer.
