A White House plan to reform the country’s legal immigration system includes a provision that mandates the use of E-Verify to prevent employers from hiring illegal aliens over American citizens.

On Thursday, President Trump announced his plan to reform the legal immigration system such that foreign nationals would be selected based on their merit, skills, and education level and then go through a rigorous assimilation period before obtaining permanent residence.

While the plan does not reduce the level of legal immigration — where more than 1.2 million legal immigrants are admitted to the U.S. every year to compete against America’s working and middle class for jobs — as his 2015, 2016, and 2017 plans did, the effort does include a provision to mandate E-Verify, the system used by employers to verify that they are not hiring illegal aliens.

“The President’s proposal will ensure that all employees are legally authorized to work,” the plan mentions in its summary.

Mandatory E-Verify, pro-American immigration reformers previously said, was crucial to any immigration plan unveiled by the White House as, currently, American workers are forced to compete against illegal aliens for working class jobs in a majority of states that do not mandate the use of E-Verify.

“Even though the plan doesn’t reduce numbers overall, it contains no amnesty or guest worker increases, mandates E-Verify, and addresses the wholesale abuse of our asylum policies,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) RJ Hauman told Breitbart News.

“The literal elephant in the room is this – will all 53 Senate Republicans get behind the president on his signature issue and stay there, or will they hijack the proposal to please cheap labor interests,” Hauman said.

Sources close to Breitbart News previously said the mandatory E-Verify provision would mirror former Rep. Lamar Smith’s (R-TX) Legal Workforce Act. The exact policy, like whether the provision would mandate employers to authorize their currently employed workers along with future hires, remains unclear.

In states that have implemented mandatory E-Verify, the program has resulted in fewer jobless Americans, the most recent study by FAIR has found.

Since 2012, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia have all implemented one form or another of mandatory E-Verify. In some of these states, like Alabama, all public and private employers must screen potential employees to weed out illegal alien applicants. In other states, like North Carolina, all public employers and government contractors are required to use E-Verify.

All of these states, except for Tennessee, saw their unemployment rate decline a year after implementing mandatory E-Verify. Likewise, when Florida, Louisiana, and Indiana implemented forms of mandatory E-Verify, all three states saw a decline in unemployment at a greater rate than the national average at the time.

Mandatory E-Verify continues to be one of the most popular national immigration policies across party lines and the American electorate. In November 2018 exit polling by Zogby Analytics for FAIR, a total of 75 percent of American voters said they support mandatory E-Verify to prevent businesses from hiring illegal aliens over U.S. workers.

This includes a majority of Democrats, nearly 55 percent; more than 90 percent of Republicans, and nearly 80 percent of swing voters who support mandatory E-Verify. Across all demographic groups, mandatory E-Verify enjoys majority support. More than 80 percent of white Americans, nearly 74 percent of Asian Americans, 58 percent of Hispanic Americans, and nearly 53 percent of black Americans support the implementation of mandatory E-Verify to shore up jobs for American citizens.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.