OK, I took some editorial license on the line from the 1970s song by C.W. McCall about truckers bantering on their CB radios, but the spirit of the song applies to our ongoing dispute with Mexico over access to U.S. highways.

On Friday, the comment period will end in the Federal Register on a pilot program proposed by the Obama administration that would allow qualified Mexican trucks and their Mexican drivers to make long-haul deliveries within the United States. With the exception of a brief interlude from 2007 to 2009, the U.S. has banned Mexican trucks from serving destinations within the United States.

I explain why this is bad for our economy and our reputation as a nation in an op-ed this morning in the Washington Times and in my own comments filed with the Federal Register. As I wrote in the op-ed:

Despite the hundreds of complaints already posted in the Federal Register, the Mexican trucking issue has never been about safety. The proposed pilot program would require Mexican trucks entering the United States to meet all federal regulations on driver qualifications, truck safety, emissions, fuel taxes, immigration and insurance.

Experience from the previous pilot program in 2007-09 demonstrated that Mexican trucks and their drivers are fully capable of complying with all U.S. safety requirements.

An August 2009 report from the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General found that only 1.2 percent of Mexican drivers that were inspected were placed out of service for violations, compared with nearly 7 percent of U.S. drivers who were inspected. In February 2010, the Congressional Research Service reported that recent data provided by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration found that “Mexican trucks are as safe as U.S. trucks and that the drivers are generally safer than U.S. drivers.” What the Teamsters and their congressional allies really object to is that these trucks will be driven by Mexicans.

The Obama administration deserves credit for its effort to end this dispute in the face of pressure from its union base. The sooner we allow more freedom and competition in the cross-border trucking sector, the better.

“Let Them [Safety Certified Mexican] Truckers Roll, 10-4” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The federal government will keep data about every person submitted to the “E-Verify” background check system for 10 years.

At least that’s my read of the slightly unclear notice describing the “United States Citizenship Immigration Services 009 Compliance Tracking and Monitoring System” in today’s Federal Register. (A second notice exempts this data from many protections of the Privacy Act.)

To make sure that people aren’t abusing E-Verify, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Verification Division, Monitoring and Compliance Branch will watch how the system is used. It will look for misuse, such as when a single Social Security Number is submitted to the system many times, which suggests that it is being used fraudulently.

How do you look for this kind of misuse (and others, more clever)? You collect all the data that goes into the system and mine it for patterns consistent with misuse.

The notice purports to limit the range of people whose data will be held in the system, listing “Individuals who are the subject of E-Verify or SAVE verifications and whose employer is subject to compliance activities.” But if the Monitoring Compliance Branch is going to find what it’s looking for, it’s going to look at data about all individuals submitted to E-Verify. “Employer subject to compliance activities” is not a limitation because all employers will be subject to “compliance activities” simply for using the system.

In my paper on electronic employment eligibility verification systems like E-Verify, I wrote how such systems “would add to the data stores throughout the federal government that continually amass information about the lives, livelihoods, activities, and interests of everyone—especially law-abiding citizens.”

It’s in the DNA of E-Verify to facilitate surveillance of every American worker. Today’s Federal Register notice is confirmation of that.

E-Verify: The Surveillance Solution is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog