Utah lawmakers advance bill to boost number of firms checking workers' migratory status

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Utah's HB294 calls on companies with 100 or more workers to use status verification programs to make sure their employees are in the country legally.
That's up from just companies with 150 or more workers, and the bill received a favorable committee recommendation.
The proposal is one of several Utah lawmakers are considering to crack down on illegal immigration.

SALT LAKE CITY — A measure to boost the number of Utah employers required to make sure new workers are in the country legally, one of several proposals this session targeting illegal immigration, received a favorable recommendation.

HB294 would require companies with 100 or more workers to use status verification systems like the federal E-Verify program when hiring employees, expanding the pool from just larger companies with 150 or more employees, the current cutoff. The House Business, Labor and Commerce Committee voted 7-3 on Wednesday to forward the proposal with a favorable recommendation, and now it goes to the full Utah House for debate.

Rep. Tiara Auxier, R-Morgan, the bill's sponsor, characterized the measure as a means of cracking down on immigrants who use false or stolen Social Security numbers to get jobs. Systems like E-Verify help authenticate the identification workers use in getting jobs. She also characterized it as a response to constituents seeking more action to crack down on the number of immigrants in the country illegally.

Some business groups may oppose the measure, Auxier said, "but I think that this is a very measured response." She originally proposed requiring companies with 50 or more workers to use systems like E-Verify, affecting around 4,450 businesses in Utah. But ahead of Wednesday's action, she changed the threshold to companies with 100 or more employees, around 2,244 companies, according to estimates for the first quarter of 2025 from the Utah Department of Workforce Services.

A similar measure last year, HB214, would have lowered the threshold to businesses with five or more workers, though the minimum was later amended to 15 and then 50. At any rate, it stalled.

The E-Verify requirement, currently and under HB294, contains no mechanism to make sure companies abide by it, a point of concern for some. Auxier, though, said a federal study shows that such laws, regardless of enforcement, have the effect of reducing the number of immigrants in the country illegally in the workforce.

"I have faith in our business owners that they will follow the law," she said. "That's going to be up to them to decide, but I think it's up to us to show what message that we're sending to the citizens of our state who are worried about this."

Casey Hill, director of the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents about 3,500 companies in Utah, expressed support for the measure. Companies with 100 or more workers typically have the sort of sophisticated human resources systems more capable of abiding by such verification requirements.

Federal lawmakers should take action to combat illegal immigration, said Rep. Jason Kyle, R-Huntsville, "but ... us doing what we can do here is important."

Critics of the measure variously suggested it would be a burden on smaller companies and called it a "message" bill because of its lack of enforcement.

Scott Babcock, a lawyer in the construction industry, said the aim of the measure "is just to make life miserable for people (so) that they'll self-deport." If such an exodus of immigrants were to occur, he warned, it would have "horrific impacts" on the economy. Several other measures this session take aim at immigrants in the country illegally, including HB88, meant to keep the population from accessing public health care, food and other benefits.

"This is a federal problem. It should be solved by them. We don't want 50 states independently trying to change enforcement mechanisms and pick this and pick that," he said.

Likewise, Craig Madsen, who owns a construction business in Lehi, warned of the ripple effect of moves to crack down on illegal immigration, to remove immigrants in the country illegally from the U.S. workforce. He favors keeping the law as is, affecting just companies with 150 or more workers.

"There's jobs in construction and farming, in hospitality, that just will not be filled," he said. "These immigrants that are here, some that have been here for decades, they actually will do the work, and we need them to do the work."

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.