There have been many calls to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. But what if, instead of abolishing ICE, we considered a more modest political proposal? What if we just abolished E-Verify instead, a costly and ineffective program that generates significant false positives (over 80% of “illegal” workers are able to circumvent the system) and a non-trivial amount false negatives (some 64,000 legal workers per year are erroneously flagged as illegal)? Also, even if E-Verify were costless and 100% accurate, why should we tolerate this direct interference with liberty of contract, our natural right to enter into contracts with whoever (whomever?) we wish? In any case, a complete E-Verify dataset is presented below:
prior probability 