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As President Obama Announces Job Plans, GOP Readies to Announce Its Jobs-Killing Scheme: E-Verify

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e-verifyTonight, the President announces to the nation his much-awaited jobs plan. Many Republicans are already protesting; they think they have it all figured out. They’re moving ahead with their very own jobs plan, crafted by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), in the form of a national ID system called E-Verify.

Their E-Verify jobs plan is amazing — at killing jobs. It’s so amazing that it would kill approximately 800,000 of them, as well as an entire agricultural industry.  Their “jobs” plan affects undocumented immigrants, naturalized immigrants, as well as native-born Americans. Their “jobs” plan will hurt small businesses, which employ over 50 percent of the U.S. workforce and have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the last 15 years. This GOP “jobs” plan is really a devious scheme to mass-deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in this country, and will, as a result, ruin the economy.

In the House, the move to pass E-verify is led by the anti-immigrant “Three Amigos“.  Rep. Lamar Smith is joined by his allies, Reps. Elton Gallegly (R-CA) and Steve King (R-TX). Even though this national ID system is nowhere close to being functional, the E-Verify mark-up in the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled for next week. It has a lot of Republican support even though it’s a government mandate on all U.S. businesses and workers.  We all know how the GOP opposes mandates intensely — that is, until it’s a mandate aimed at the forced removal of undocumented workers (as is the case with E-Verify). Then, it seems, government mandates are a-okay.

With economy and jobs being the focal point of last night’s GOP debate, Mitt Romney stated that Obama “doesn’t understand how the economy works,” while his main adversary for the evening, Governor Rick Perry (TX), initiated the conversation by saying “what Americans are looking for is someone who can get this country working again…”  Perhaps the most stinging rebuke came from Speaker Gingrich who seemed to relish in his abuse of the President all evening:

The fact that President Obama doesn’t come to the Reagan Library to try to figure out how to create jobs, doesn’t talk to any of these three governors to learn how to create jobs, doesn’t talk to Herman Cain to learn how to create jobs tells you that this is a president so committed to class warfare and so committed to bureaucratic socialism that he can’t possibly be effective in jobs.

We’ll see.

For the time being, neither are Republicans, whose jobs-killing “jobs plan” — E-Verify — has got to be the zaniest idea of them all.

To read more on the dangerous effects of E-Verify, check out Frank Sharry’s post, “The Truth About E-Verify,” or read our report on how the program will ruin California’s economy (it has already ruined Georgia’s).