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I have mixed feelings. I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border. Nonetheless, framing it as being about the spread of Covid has always seemed like a dirty trick, a way to get around the preference for open borders that many in the bureaucracy seem to hold. On one hand, this trick is fine because it's in response to the trick of using "asylum" to create de facto open borders, on the other hand, I just don't like lying.
Note that no one, most republicans included, seems to actually want a secure border.
There are a range of employers who would love to have a large pool of low wage workers who aren't protected by labor laws, low taxes, and minimal environmental regulations. A de-facto guest worker situation where migrants can enter the country but have no political rights, no access to entitlements, and are subject to threat of deportation serves their interests. Agriculture, meat processing, and construction are all powerful economic interests capable of organizing and lobbying for their needs.
The usage of E-Verify is something of a proxy for the balance of power between anti-immigration Republicans and this sort of employer. Many states in the south have mandatory E-Verify but major border states like Texas and Florida do not, or did not until recently. When Florida tried to do Mandatory E-Verify in 2020 they originally amended it so that agricultural employers would be exempt. But as far as I can tell the 2023 bill mandating E-Verify that passed a few days ago does not exempt Agriculture.
It'll be interesting to see how that shakes out. There's already been substantial wage growth at the bottom of the labor market post-2020 so if farmer's have to start hiring legal workers it could drive up costs of fruit. Part of the case for immigration restrictions is that it would increase wages for native workers, but those costs would obviously be passed on to native consumers. I don't think it'll be a major issue for Republicans in 2024 because the President always gets the credit or the blame for economic conditions. But if Republicans ever did enact serious restrictions on the labor supply it'd be interesting to see how they'd handle the ensuing inflation.
Slavery, whether de facto or de jure, introduces a market distortion to the supposed normative state of freemen hiring freemen for all available jobs. Minimum wage laws drive the market demand for slavery. Thus, one potential solution is to have a lower state minimum for agriculture and other rural jobs. But then unionization picks up where the minimum wage left off, and reintroduces the demand for ununionized de facto slaves.
Unionization of Agricultural workers is really hard for a variety of structural reasons and at least in California the United Farm Workers is basically dead.
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