House Education and Workforce Subcommittee on Workforce Protections Hearing
E-Verify: Ensuring Lawful Employment in America
Wednesday, November 19, 2025
The AFL-CIO is a federation of 64 affiliated unions representing more than 15 million workers across all sectors of our economy. Our members work in every state in the nation and they come from every region of the world. Like the workforce as a whole, our membership consists of people with all types of immigration status. Together, we strive to ensure that every person who works in this country receives decent pay, good benefits, safe working conditions, and fair treatment on the job.
The labor movement is united around a comprehensive approach to immigration reform and labor law enforcement that lifts standards for all workers. To have a functioning immigration system, we need an employment eligibility verification mechanism that holds employers accountable and respects workers’ rights. E-Verify in its current form falls far short of that mark. The system has shown persistent error rates and affords insufficient privacy and due process protections, opening the door to discrimination and retaliation.
All too often, employers are able to evade mechanisms like E-Verify and use them as tools to bust unions and chill the exercise of workplace rights. These threats are even more severe now that this administration has stripped nearly two million people of work authorization, dismantled the National Labor Relations Board and driven out critical staff at the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. The combination of expanding pools of vulnerable workers and gutted resources for labor enforcement agencies create an environment in which E-Verify can be used by employers to retaliate against workers for engaging in protected activity with impunity.
Congress must address these core concerns and ensure that workers have strong and enforceable legal remedies against employers who violate labor laws and misuse the system. Congress must ensure that our labor enforcement agencies have the resources they need to monitor compliance and respond quickly and effectively to worker complaints. The immigration verification process must be taken out of the hands of employers, and employers who fail to use the system properly must face strict liability.
Any expansion of E-Verify without addressing these fundamental issues will hurt working people. It will result in continued errors that cost workers their jobs, increase misclassification of workers as independent contractors, and push working people deeper into the shadow economy, further undermining our freedom to join together and fight to raise wages for all.
We call on lawmakers to create labor policies that lift wages and standards for all workers by ensuring that there are fully funded and functional labor agencies to protect workers’ rights and creating a path to citizenship for all those whose labor helps our country to prosper. By comparison, expanding E-Verify, a flawed mechanism that fails to ensure basic worker protections, will only embolden abusive employers to discriminate and retaliate against hard-working people.