Is Rep. Luis Gutierrez Pro-National ID?
There are many interesting facets to this story in the Chicago Tribune—among them Rep. Luis Gutierrez’ signal that he might support having a U.S. national ID.
“We need to know who’s working in the United States, and we need to make it easy,” Gutierrez told the paper, referring to the push to create a national ID in immigration reform legislation Congress may consider this year.
The story also describes how a UPS worker nearly lost her job because the name she was using—her married name—doesn’t match up with Social Security Administration records. I discussed how electronic employment eligibility verification would plunge Americans into an identity-bureaucracy morass in my paper, “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”
Expect much more Kafkaesque identity bureaucracy—and greater government control of your life—if a national ID is part of immigration reform. When you find out that your papers aren’t in order and that you’ve been denied access to work, housing, financial services, and health care, one of the Washington deal-makers you have to thank may be Luis Gutierrez.
Questions for Heritage: REAL ID
The Heritage Foundation’s “The Foundry” blog has a post up called “Questions for Secretary Napolitano: Real ID.”
Honest advocates on two sides of an issue can come to almost perfectly opposite views, and this provides an example, because I find the post confused, wrong, or misleading in nearly every respect.
Let’s give it a brief fisking. Below, the language from the post is in italics, and my comments are in roman text:
U.S. Chamber on Electronic Employment Verification
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a new paper out on electronic employment verification systems. Using government estimates, it finds that operating a nationwide worker background check system would cost $10 billion a year.
The Chamber is no opponent of requiring employers to check workers’ immigration status — I oppose the policy, preferring to live in a free country — but the paper has a lot of information about the practical impediments to giving the federal government a say in every hiring decision.
It also gives the last word to my paper, Electronic Employment Eligibility: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration. In the paper, I discuss a method for verifying work eligibility under the current immigration law without creating a national identity system. It’s possible, but highly unlikely. As I say in my paper:
Unless the federal government can accept the risk of error and is willing to commit to lasting employment eligibility rules, it will require any internal enforcement program to use databases and tracking rather than just issuing cards that prove eligibility to work and nothing more. It will push Americans toward a national ID and worker surveillance system.
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