An important aspect of any policy is compliance and enforcement. Compliance means getting participants to act in the way we would like, ensuring they comply with a given program. This notion is often confused with enforcement, which generally means punishing people for failing to comply. Border Patrol and ICE are all about enforcement, not compliance.
E-Verify is an example of bad policy, both with respect to compliance and enforcement.
E-Verify comes into play when a migrant -- the seller of labor -- is about the enter into an agreement with an employer -- a buyer of labor. By the time the issue of E-Verify rolls around, the migrant and employer in all likelihood have agreed to do business together. However, the employer is legally obligated to use E-Verify before concluding the transaction. Alas, the sole purpose of E-Verify is to prevent a transaction from occurring. It provides no value to either party. In the dating world, it would be the equivalent of 'E-Chaperone', whose purpose is preventing boys and girls from kissing the wrong partner. One can imagine how popular that might be. Not only do the parties have no incentive to comply, they have a powerful incentive not to comply.
As a result, compliance must be compelled with the threat of enforcement: punishing migrants and employers who try to work together illicitly. How effective is this threat?
We have already established that the likelihood of an illegal alien being deported from the US interior, barring a criminal offense, is roughly 8 in 10,000 per year. The risk to the migrant is minimal.
As for the employers, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University
Not only are few employers [of illegal immigrants] prosecuted, fewer who are convicted receive sentences that amount to more than token punishment. Prison sentences are rare. For example, of the 11 individuals the Justice Department reported as convicted during the most recent 12-month period [of April 2018 - March 2019], only 3 were sentenced to serve prison time.
This can be projected onto the 570,000 employers who received 'no match' letters from Social Security and who may be presumed to employ the undocumented. Another several hundred thousand companies probably employ the undocumented with no paperwork at all. Therefore, the odds of enforcement against an employer in any given year is probably on the order of one per hundred thousand.
As a practical matter, both the employer and the migrant face vanishingly small odds of enforcement for flouting employee verification in any given year.
Thus, E-Verify is the very embodiment of bad design: a compliance procedure issued in direct opposition to the interests of the involved parties, accompanied by virtually no meaningful enforcement.
One cannot help but wonder how this state of affairs came to be. Either its authors were stunningly naive, or baldly cynical. It is, of course, the latter. Black markets inevitably generate hypocrisy, because they pit our self interest against our social interest. All of us want a properly documented society and controlled border crossings. At the same time, the employer needs an employee, the migrant needs a job, and all of us need cheap food and housing which those very migrants will build and subsequently clean and tend. The system is therefore the result of just this tension: the appearance of interior enforcement without the substance.
This may infuriate conservatives. The key, however, is to accept that employers and employees will come together as a matter of course, and that they produce goods and services of value to the rest of us. These are inherently legitimate activities. At the same time, society has a right to control its borders. Therefore, it is a matter of finding a workable balance rather than taking extreme positions on either end of the spectrum.
The most important feature of a migrant labor system is ensuring that the buyer and seller have an interest in complying with regulations. We would describe this as a 'pull' system (and E-Verify as a 'push' system). No one has forced you to buy a smartphone, but if you are reading this, you almost certainly have one. You did this because the money you pay for the phone and associated service are worth more than its cost to you.
If buyers and sellers have an incentive to work within the system, then compliance will be high without enforcement. This is and should be a principal objective of migrant policy. And it is exactly what market-based visas do.