Over at National Review Online this morning, I ask how the Ronald Reagan of 1980 would have fared in today’s Iowa caucuses given his views on how to tackle illegal immigration (“GOP Candidates Betray the Spirit of Reagan on Immigration”). My conclusion, based on the current mood of many Republicans, is that Reagan would have been the target of a barrage of attack ads:

In April 1980, when Ronald Reagan was competing in the presidential primaries, he rejected the building of a wall between the United States and Mexico: “Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit — and then while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back. And open the border both ways by understanding their problems.”

If a Republican presidential candidate said such a thing today, he or she would suffer withering criticism for being soft on illegal immigration. Instead, we hear Reagan’s successors talk about implementing national ID cards, imposing intrusive regulations on the labor market, raiding farms, factories, and restaurants, and harassing small-business owners trying to survive in this tough economy, all in the name of chasing away hard-working immigrants.

The unhealthy competition among the current Republican candidates to sound tough on immigration also risks alienating millions of Hispanic voters who could otherwise be persuaded to support the party. If conservatives want to rediscover the more optimistic, inclusive, reform-minded spirit of Reagan, they should be talking about real immigration reform, not about spending more money and enacting more sweeping regulations to enforce a fundamentally flawed system.

GOP the Loser in Primary Fight over Immigration is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This weekend, New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat wrote a piece full of common sense thinking about immigration control and the E-Verify federal background check system.

“Common sense”—or “what most people think”—is an interesting thing: When generations of direct experience accumulate, common sense becomes one of the soundest guides to action. Think of common law, its source deep in history, molded in tiny increments over hundreds of years. Common law rules against fraud, theft, and violence strike a brilliant balance between harm avoidance and freedom.

When most people lack first-hand knowledge of a topic, though, common sense can go quite wrong. Such is the case with ”common sense” in the immigration area, which is not a product of experience but collective surmise. Douthat, who has the unenviable task of leaping from issue to issue weekly, indulges such surmise and gets it wrong.

Take, for example, the premise that American workers lose when immigration rates are high: “Amnesty,” says Douthat, would “be folly (and a political nonstarter) in this economic climate, which has left Americans without high school diplomas (who tend to lose out from low-skilled immigration) facing a 15 percent unemployment rate.”

On the whole, American workers do not lose out in the face of immigration. To the extent some do, it is penny-wise and pound foolish to retard our economy (in which displaced workers participate) and overall well-being (which affects displaced workers, too) in the name of protecting status quo jobs for a small number of native-borns.

Full immigration reform that includes generous opportunities for new low-skill workers is not folly, whatever its political prospects may be.

But I want to focus on Douthat’s conclusion that E-Verify is the way forward for immigration control. He cites a study finding that Arizona’s adoption of an E-Verify mandate caused the non-citizen Hispanic population of Arizona to fall by roughly 92,000 persons, or 17 percent, over the 2008–2009 period, and concludes:

[M]aybe — just maybe — America’s immigration rate isn’t determined by forces beyond any lawmaker’s control. Maybe public policy can make a difference after all. Maybe we could have an immigration system that looked as if it were designed on purpose, not embraced in a fit of absence of mind.

Though tentative, his implication is that a national E-Verify mandate is the solution. Everything that came before was the product of fevered impulses.  Maybe E-Verify is the most practical solution. Douthat’s calm tone sounds like common sense.

Ah, but neither Douhtat or the authors of the study have thought that problem all the way through (and the study doesn’t claim to): The decline in Arizona was not produced simply by moving illegal immigrants from Arizona back to Mexico and Central America. They went to Washington state and other places in the United States that are less inhospitable to immigrants. A national E-Verify mandate would offer no similar refuge, and the move to underground (or “informal”) employment would occur in larger proportion than it did in Arizona.

The report also cautions that the honeymoon in Arizona may not hold:

[T]he initial effects of the legislation are unlikely to persist if actors in the labor market learn that there are no consequences from violating these laws. Hence, for long-term effectiveness, policymakers should also consider the role of employer sanctions, which have not played a large role in Arizona’s results so far. However, policymakers must weigh the sought-after drop in unauthorized employment against the costs associated with shifting workers into informal employment.

That’s antiseptic language for: investigations of employers, raids on workers, heavy penalties on both, and growth in black markets and a criminal underground. “Balmy” is a way of describing the temperature potatoes pass through in a pressure cooker.

It’s hard, on analysis, to see Arizona’s experience being replicated or improved upon by an E-Verify mandate that’s national in scale without a great deal of discomfort and cost. I surveyed the demerits of electronic employment eligibility verification in “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

There is more not to love in the Douthat piece. Take a look at this shrug-o’-the-shoulders to the deep flaws in the concept of “internal enforcement” and E-Verify:

Arizona business interests called it unfair and draconian. (An employer’s business license is suspended for the first offense and revoked for the second.) Civil liberties groups argued that the E-Verify database’s error rate is unacceptably high, and that the law creates a presumptive bias against hiring Hispanics. If these arguments sound familiar, it’s because similar critiques are always leveled against any attempt to actually enforce America’s immigration laws. From the border to the workplace, immigration enforcement is invariably depicted as terribly harsh, hopelessly expensive and probably racist into the bargain.

We should disregard these problems because they’re familiar? With regard to E-Verify, they’re familiar because they are the natural consequence of dragooning the productive sector into enforcing maladjusted laws against free movement of people from a particular ethnic category to where their labor is most productive.

Problem-solving is welcome, and columnists like Ross Douthat have to at least point to a solution with regularity. But this effort, sounding in common sense, does not rise to the challenge. The solution is not even more enforcement of laws inimical to human freedom. The solution is reforming immigration laws to comport with … common sense!

E-Verify and Common Sense is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It is a premise of national identification policy that requiring proof of lawful presence to get an ID, then requiring the use of that ID for many essential functions of life, would make it more difficult to be an illegal immigrant in the United States. The natural result of having a national ID and routine identity checks would be suppression of illegal immigration. The premise is undoubtedly true.

The question is how much influence it would have on illegal immigrants’ decision whether to come to, or remain in, this country. And how much it would cause illegal immigrants to take other steps, such as avoidance of ID checks?

A recent article in the Arizona Republic illustrates that leaving the country isn’t the obvious step for illegal immigrants faced with the lawful presence requirement. “Illegal Immigrants Flocking to 3 States to Obtain Identification” tells the story of how illegal immigrant Carlos Hernandez moved his family to Washington state after the passage of S.B. 1070 in Arizona. The story is illustrated with a picture of Hernandez watching his 2-year-old daughter play on a slide near their apartment in Burien, Washington.

“Hernandez said he knows other illegal immigrants who considered New Mexico because of the ease of getting a license. But he and others thought Washington would be safer.”

One inference from the story is that states with “weak” licensing requirements should tighten things up. But would Hernandez’ young daughter have better prospects if he moved the family to Puebla, Mexico, or would she be better off living in the United States with a father who acquired a false U.S. identification? In many cases, a family man like Hernandez will take the risk of acquiring and using false ID to provide his daughter the stable environment and opportunities the United States has to offer.

A national ID system, and background checks instituted for access to work, housing, and financial services, would suppress illegal immigration some, but it would also drive greater identity fraud and corruption.

The next question is how much inconvenience and tracking the natural-born and naturalized citizens of the country should suffer in order to achieve the marginal gains of presssuring illegal immigrants this way.

On balance, the gains are not worth the costs—especially when the “gains” include making life worse for Carlos Hernandez’ young daughter.

Yes, Illegal Immigrants Are Influenced by ID Policies is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, the Obama administration filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Arizona’s recently enacted law that is designed to curb illegal immigration. The Arizona law has not yet taken effect — that will occur on July 29.  To generate more discussion and debate, Cato will be hosting a policy forum on the legal challenge and related issues on July 21.  If the weather in DC continues to cooperate, it will feel like we are actually in Arizona.

Go here for Cato work related to immigration policy.

Feds Challenge Arizona Immigration Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama spoke this morning at American University on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. The president deserves credit for turning his attention to a thorny problem that desperately needs action from Congress, but the speech failed to hit at least one important note.

While the president called for comprehensive reform, he neglected to advocate the expansion of legal immigration in the future through a temporary or guest worker program for low-skilled immigrants. Even his own Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has said such a program is the necessary “third leg” of immigration reform, the other two being legalization of undocumented workers already here and vigorous enforcement against those still operating outside the system.

As I’ve pointed out plenty of times, without accommodation for the ongoing labor needs of our country, any reform would repeat the failures of the past. In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized 2.7 million workers already here illegally, while beefing up enforcement. But without a new visa program to allow more low-skilled workers to enter legally in future years, illegal immigration just began to climb again to where, two decades later, we are trying once again to solve the same problem.

On the plus side, President Obama reminded his audience of the important role immigrants play in our open and dynamic country. And he rightly linked immigration reform to securing our borders:

“[T]here are those who argue that we should not move forward with any other elements of reform until we have fully sealed our borders. But our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols. It won’t work. Our borders will not be secure as long as our limited resources are devoted to not only stopping gangs and potential terrorists, but also the hundreds of thousands who attempt to cross each year simply to find work.

Unfortunately, given the political climate in Washington, an election looming only four months away, and the president’s unwillingness to press for an essential element of successful reform, the illegal immigration problem will still be on the agenda when a new Congress comes to town in 2011.

President Obama’s Incomplete Speech on Immigration is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The June issue of Cato’s monthly newsletter on immigration reform, just released, tackles the timely topic of “Immigrants and Crime: Perceptions vs. Reality.” The bulletin finds that, contrary to public perception, immigration has not caused higher crime rates, in Arizona or in the nation as a whole. In fact, one new study even suggests that a rising level of immigration in a city actually leads to lower crime rates.

According to bulletin editor and author Stuart Anderson, a Cato adjunct scholar, “National studies have reached the conclusion that foreign-born (both legal and illegal immigrants) are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.” It’s an important fact to consider as other states look to copy Arizona’s tough new law against illegal immigration, which was in large part motivated by fears of crime.

The latest bulletin is the third in a series Cato plans to publish through 2010 and into 2011. The May issue analyzed the pluses and minuses of a Senate Democratic proposal to reform U.S. immigration law, and the April issue critiqued efforts to impose a national ID card and the E-Verify system.

You can sign up here to receive the bulletin each month by email.

Latest Immigration Reform Bulletin Examines Immigrant Crime Myth is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As recent posts in this space indicate, advocates of individual liberty have a variety of views on the proper policy response to illegal immigration. Whatever the disagreements, I suspect there’s some degree of consensus that certain proposed remedies are entirely too Draconian. From the California Labor and Employment Law Blog:

The U.S. Attorneys Office in San Diego has recently criminally prosecuted a French bakery for allegedly engaging in an intentional pattern and practice of hiring unauthorized workers. As part of the indictment, the Government is seeking hefty monetary fines, prison time for the owner and management, and asset forfeiture of the entire business to the Government. While the Government does not have experience running a French bakery, they are getting very serious about enforcing I-9 regulations.

More details on the French Gourmet prosecution can be found at the San Diego Union-Tribune and Restaurant Hospitality.

When government began pushing for asset forfeiture powers, some imagined that the formidable power would remain mostly confined to use in, say, illegal drug or money laundering prosecutions. But that’s not how it has worked. And immigration is hardly the only area in which employers should be worried about the expanding bounds of criminalization. Bills pending in Congress would criminalize “misclassification” of employees — which commonly consists of disagreeing with the government or with labor unions as to whether particular employees should count as independent contractors not covered by overtime and similar federal labor laws. Are we far from the day when prosecutors will start proposing forfeitures against employers over such infractions?

Feds Propose Forfeiture as Immigration Employer Sanction is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Responding to my immigration post this morning, my colleagues Dan Griswold and Jason Kuznicki have focused on the single short paragraph that touched on the substance of the matter. (The question before me, posed by Politico Arena, concerned mainly the political implications of the new Arizona law, given the latest Pew Research Center poll on the issue.) I quite agree with both that we’ve never had full control of our southern border (or any border, for that matter), but as Dan has noted elsewhere, when we had a guest-worker program in place, illegal immigration dropped by 95 percent – no small drop. And illegal, not legal, immigration is the issue before us. And Dan is right too that we’ve thrown a lot of enforcement at the problem in recent years, to limited avail, so it’s not true that Congress hasn’t done anything. What it has done, however, hasn’t addressed the real problem, the underlying substantive law, as Dan has often written.

I’m struck, though, by Jason’s unqualified comment that he can’t say he shares my views on immigration.” Really? I did say, I believe, that Congress needs to address the problem, including with a guest-worker program. And I also said that “It hardly needs saying that a welfare state, in the age of terrorism, cannot have open borders.” I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with that.

Concerning both the welfare state and terrorism, Jason points to “remedies” at the far end of the problem. He writes, for example, that our welfare state is going broke anyway, and “compared to the damage being done by native-born U.S. citizens and their cursedly long lifespans, the immigrants’ overall effects are quite small.” (I won’t take that “cursedly long lifespan” point personally.) True, but in places where the welfare state issues are concentrated, like border-state emergency rooms and schools, that long-term national perspective isn’t the issue. Yes, getting the government out of health care and education might ameliorate those localized problems (that question’s for another day), but we can’t always wait for more remote problems to be solved before we address more immediate ones.

And that goes for Jason’s terrorism point, too. He writes: “Without the black market in drugs, we’d have a lot less to fear from terrorists, particularly on our southern border.” I’m all for legalizing recreational drugs. But I was alluding to Islamic terrorists, not narco-terrorists, when I spoke of getting control of our borders. Legalizing drugs (again, a more remote remedy) might have some effect on the coffers of Islamic terrorists, but it would hardly solve the terrorism problem. As long as that problem exists, we need border control. Let’s remember, for example, that it was an alert border agent who thwarted the would-be LAX bomber.

Immigration II: On the Substance of the Matter is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a gutsy display for a newspaper, the Arizona Republic in a front-page editorial yesterday castigated the state’s top politicians for a failure of leadership on immigration.

Prompting the editorial was the passage of Arizona’s tough new law making it a crime to be an illegal immigrant in the state. Under the banner headline, “STOP FAILING ARIZONA; START FIXING IMMIGRATION,” the state’s major newspaper fired with both barrels:

We need leaders.
The federal government is abdicating its duty on the border.
Arizona politicians are pandering to public fear.
The result is a state law that intimidates Latinos while doing nothing to curb illegal immigration.
This represents years of failure. Years of politicians taking the easy way and allowing the debate to descend into chaos.
The Arizona Republic has been calling for comprehensive immigration reform continuously since 2002. For a brief time, our congressional delegation led the nation on
this front. But no more.
Now, it seems our elected officials prefer to serve political expediency instead.

The editorial then named ten prominent political leaders from the state, Republicans and Democrats alike, who have either failed to champion real reform for fear of a political backlash, or who have stoked the backlash with inflammatory rhetoric.

2002 was also the year that the Cato Institute made the case for comprehensive immigration reform with my study, “Willing Workers: Fixing the Problem of Illegal Mexican Migration to the United States.” The study argued that enforcement alone will not solve the problem. Immigration law itself must be changed to accommodate the legitimate labor-force needs of a growing U.S. economy.

The Republic editorial put the argument succinctly:

Reform must create a legal pipeline for future workers that is demand-based and temporary. With a legal framework in place, there will be no reason to be in this country without permission. Foreigners who break our laws will be prosecuted, punished and deported.

Comprehensive reform will make the border safer. When migrant labor is channeled through the legal ports of entry, the Border Patrol can focus on catching drug smugglers and other criminals instead of chasing busboys across the desert.

Real leaders will have the courage to say that.

One real newspaper has shown them how.

Arizona Republic Leads the Way on Immigration is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Senate Democrats have solidified and given more definition to their plan to create a biometric national ID, the centerpiece of their immigration reform proposal. (For reasons unrelated to the national ID plan, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has dropped out of the picture for now.) The “Conceptual Proposal for Immigration Reform” they released last week gives much more detail to the sketchy plans I previously reviewed.

In my Cato Policy Analysis, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution for Illegal Immigration,” I wrote about the possibility of a work authorization document limited to that purpose—and my doubts that the government would adopt one.

A credential such as eligibility for employment under [the immigration laws] can be proved without creating a nationwide biometric tracking scheme. In fact, templates already exist. But it is unlikely to see adoption. . . . [I]dentification and tracking . . . shift the risk of error in the card-issuance process from the government to the citizen. . . . [T]racking preserves government power. A work-eligibility and tracking system . . . makes the individual’s employment eligibility subject to revision at a later time, if the government wants to change the rules or adapt the system to new purposes, for example.

Those doubts are validated by this plan, which appears to be a full-fledged national ID and national biometric database. Assurances that it won’t be used for purposes beyond immigration control are not persuasive. This is national identity and surveillance infrastructure that will be “switched on” by later policy changes.

They’re calling it “BELIEVE,” short for “Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information, and Electronic Verification of Employment.” They can call it that. We’ll study it, and give credence to what we learn.

The plan is confusing, disorganized, repetitive, and sometimes contradictory. Summarizing it is a little like trying to piece together the egg when all you have is the omelet, but three themes emerge: First, this summary backs away from an earlier claim that there would not be a biometric national identity database. There will be a national biometric database. Second, repeating the word “fraud-proof” does not make this national ID system fraud proof. Third, this national ID system definitely paves the way for uses beyond work authorization. This is the comprehensive national identity system that people across the ideological and political spectrum oppose.

The national ID part of the Democrats’ proposal begins at the bottom of page eight. It’s a veritable word-cloud, suggesting a violation of the rule of thumb that simple solutions are usually the best. But let’s look at it, line by line.

Not later than 18 months after the date of enactment of this proposal, the Social Security Administration will begin issuing biometric social security cards.

That’s pretty darn ambitious. Watch for any national ID plan to take several years to get started, decades to complete. The REAL ID Act—a simpler proposal than this one—has been law for five years and not a single compliant card has yet been issued. Not one.

These cards will be fraud-resistant, tamper-resistant, wear resistant, and machine-readable social security cards containing a photograph and an electronically coded micro-processing chip which possesses a unique biometric identifier for the authorized card-bearer.

All these things are easier said than done. And “fraud-resistant”? That’s unlikely. We won’t know until we see details.

The card will also possess the following characteristics:

We’ll take them in chunks.

(1) biometric identifiers, in the form of templates, that definitively tie the individual user to the identity credential;

Cards have biometrics today—low-tech ones like your picture and a copy of your signature printed on it. Here, “biometric identifiers” probably refers to machine-readable biometrics like fingerprints or iris scans. The card wouldn’t have an image of the biometric itself, but rather a mathematical description of its key features—the arches, loops, and whorls in your fingerprint and their distances from one another, for example. Research continues into how secure these algorithms are against future high-tech versions of identity fraud.

(2) electronic authentication capability;

This is pretty opaque, but it confirms again that the card will have a computer chip. “Authentication” is a word without a distinct meaning—what fact will be proven to whom, and how will it be proven? We have to learn more.

(3) ability to verify the individual locally without requiring every employer to access a biometric database; (4) offline verification capability (eliminating the need for 24-hour, 7-days-per-week online databases);

This is two ways of saying roughly the same thing. How will this goal be achieved? Without more information, the privacy and security issues are hard to assess. 

A freestanding ability to verify individuals without accessing a biometric database implies that there will be a biometric database, a likelihood I noted earlier.

(5) security features that protect the information stored on the card; (6) privacy protections that allow the user to control who is able to access the data on the card;

Security protects privacy so these two features are siblings if not one feature. But these opaque claims don’t tell us much at all. Knowing what exact card security features the plan envisions would allow an assessment of their quality. They could be anything from distributing RFID-chipped cards with a metallic sleeve that many users will lose or fail to use—almost no protection at all—to using a card that will only reveal data when the biometric of the authorized bearer is presented to the card.

The best protection for privacy and data security is not collecting people’s identity information in one place at all, nor organizing it uniformly on a card everyone must have. A technically secure national ID card isn’t privacy protective when the bearer is practically or legally required to release the information on it. Pushing card security as a privacy feature is like looking for your keys under a lamp post. The light may be better there, but you haven’t solved the privacy issues by securing the card.

(7) compliance with authentication and biometric standards recognized by domestic and international standards organizations.

This feature conflicts with the privacy claims in the previous bullet. Compliance with standards increases the likelihood that the national ID system will interoperate with other national governments’ systems and with corporate systems. Picture a future not too far off when every government collects and shares data on every citizen and foreigner using a consistent identity system. This is an efficiency feature with huge privacy and liberty costs for individuals.

The new biometric social security card shall enable the following outcomes:

One by one:

(1) permit the individual cardholder to control who can access their information;

This is the same as characteristic (6) above.

(2) allow electronic authentication of the credential to determine work authorization;

We got this from characteristic (2) above.

(3) possession of scalability of authentication capability depending on the requirement of the application.

This jargon cloud doesn’t mean anything discernible, but it does suggest that this national ID system is being designed for multiple uses. Let’s start with some terms:

“Scalability” is the idea that a technology still works well “at scale.” A system that works will with 10 users may not work well with 10,000, and a system that works well with 10,000 users may not work well with 10,000,000 or 100,000,000. So the idea here is that it will work well with many users. It’s not enough just to say that, of course. We should know specifically how it would meet the challenges of scale.

“Authentication”—again, a poorly defined term—means adequately proving some fact, such as a person’s identity, his or her work authorization, and so on.

“Application”—another favorite word in the tech lingo—simply means “use.” A hammer has many different applications: pounding in nails, denting metal, bonking intruders on the head, and so on.

So the sentence translates roughly to: “The card system will handle large numbers of people no matter what it’s used for.”

That’s telling, because the next line in the plan claims that the system will only be used for work authorization. If it’s only used for work authorization, why would it need to handle large scale for other authorization applications?

Possession of a fraud-proof social security card will only serve as evidence of lawful work-authorization but will in no way be permitted to serve—or shall be required to be shown—as proof of citizenship or lawful immigration status.

Repeat: If this is true, why does the card work at scale for other authorization applications?

The use of the word “permitted” suggests that the card will be capable of other uses, but such uses will be barred by law. Once again, if the plan is to use the cards only for work authorization, why not design the cards to serve only that purpose and no other?

And there’s “fraud-proof” again. The plan says little or nothing about what makes the card fraud-proof. In my earlier assessment of the national ID plan as it stood then, I discussed the three different meanings the concept of “fraud-proof” may have in an identity system, and the difficulties of achieving all three.

It will be unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.

Confirmed: This will be a multi-purpose identity card. Most of the public will be barred by law from asking for the cards, but it will perform “verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.” That means, at the very least, that it can display Social Security Number and probably name. It will be convertible to lots of other purposes when mission creep takes hold.

Legal rules against using the card for new purposes don’t mean very much. If you create a system with rules like that in place, they might be in place for a while, but policymakers will think of new uses for the card, people and organizations use the card unlawfully for a while, and the weight of these “misuses” will break down the legal barriers. The national ID system created for one limited purpose will be “switched on” and it will become the full-scale surveillance device that freedom-loving Americans abhor.

No personal information will be stored on the electronic chip contained within the social security card other than the individual’s name, date of birth, social security number, and unique biometric identifier.

What more do you need? Presenting these identifiers allows organizations, public and private, to easily identify people distinctly in their data stores. Highly accurate tracking systems will grow up around this identity system, many of which provide convenience and other benefits, but the sum total of which will be a federal-government-fostered surveillance society.

And, by the way, an encrypted work authorization (see below) can act as an identifier—that’s more personal information—unless the card’s design takes some very impressive steps to prevent that.

Under no circumstances will any other information, including medical information or position-tracking information, be contained within the card.

This is nice protection—and if it’s a bar on radio frequency identification, fine—but putting these protections in law is rather quaint, though. A bar on additional data going on the card may hold up for a few decades, but it will ultimately give way to new demands for data on the card to fix some new policy problem.

And, remember, the card itself is not the only source of privacy concern. The card will facilitate highly accurate record-keeping about people’s locations when they use the cards. Location tracking may not be integral to the card, but the card will be integral to location tracking.

The Secretary of Homeland Security shall work with other agencies to secure enrollment locations at sites operated by the federal government.

Yes, you need to secure enrollment facilities or people will break in and steal equipment and data. I’m not impressed that DHS will be involved in providing physical security to SSA, and I bet SSA isn’t either.

Prior to issuing an individual a new fraud-proof social security card, the Social Security Administration will be required to verify the individual’s identity and employment eligibility by asking for production of acceptable documents to be provided by the individual as proof of identity and employment eligibility.

Yes, that’s how you do it. This is the step in the card issuance process that is probably the weakest. Forgery and corruption attacks are a function of the value to which the card controls access.

(Again with the unsubstantiated “fraud-proof”!)

The Secretary of Homeland Security will work with the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration to verify non-citizens’ employment authorization.

As they must. DHS has the info on naturalized citizens and non-citizens legally in the country.

SSA will also be required to engage in background screening verification techniques currently used by private corporations that use publicly available information that can be derived from the individual’s social security number.

This is a new one—doing database background checks on applicants for the new national ID. Rather than using only the documents proffered by the applicant for the card, the Social Security Administration would look up the claimed SSN of the applicant and see if his or her story checks out. For example, the system might compare the address claimed by the applicant to addresses that are found in public or private records. (“Publicly available” is ambiguous.)

This is a way of reducing fraud in the issuance of cards. (Mind you, it doesn’t make the process “fraud-proof!”) But it also raises new issues, particularly if the background check on the applicant will be run against private commercial data. The DHS Privacy Committee has twice issued cautionary documents about using commercial data in government applications. There are many issues, including privacy and due process, if indeed the intent is to use private databases to run background checks on applicants for a government benefit.

An administrative adjudication process can be invoked in the event that an individual is unable to establish his or her identity or lawful immigration status. Adverse decisions can be reviewed in the federal courts.

You’re gonna need it. The full range of appeals will be required if this card indeed will be used to control access to work. Some important decisions have to be made about whether a person can work while their appeal is pending. If an appeal fails, should the appellant be arrested and deported as a presumptive illegal immigrant? Expect to see stories of people who lack documentation and fixed addresses—the very poor, recovering drug addicts, and so on—who cannot prove their existence to the SSA or who don’t pass their background checks. They will find themselves unable to work because their government has denied them an officially recognized identity.

There will be a multi-stage process of re-verification if an individual claims he lost his previously issued fraud-proof social security card to ensure that there is no identity-theft or unlawful collaboration of identity.

I noted in my previous analysis that a database-free identity system is very difficult to administer, such as for replacing lost cards. The plan to address this challenge is unclear. Someone who has lost a card will have to return to the SSA and take part in this “multi-stage process of re-verification”—whatever it is—perhaps waiting to work until it has been completed. I have no idea what “unlawful collaboration of identity” is.

There will also be a multi-stage process for resolution of proper identity if an individual claims an identity tied to a social security number that has been claimed by another individual.

More undefined, but “multi-stage” processes, when a person comes to the Social Security Administration and finds that someone else has already claimed the same identity. Will they be able to work during the pendency of their “multi-stage” processing?

Tough penalties will be put in place for fraud in procurement of a fraud-proof social security card.

This raises a metaphysical question: Can there be fraud in a “fraud-proof” card? Of course there can. There is no fraud-proof card, which is why you have to penalize fraud, hoping to suppress it.

The same penalties shall apply for conspiracy to commit fraud if false information is intentionally provided.

Let’s spend just a moment on the capacity of criminal penalties to suppress fraud. It’s easy for people like us—wealthy and highly educated—to assume from the comfort of our offices that criminal penalties will suppress fraud. After all, prison looks pretty awful compared to an office. But an illegal immigrant has a different calculus. Going to jail and getting “three hots and a cot” is not a bad outcome compared to repatriation to a life of hunger and political instability in one’s home country. Committing fraud in the interest of “legitimate” work is preferable to theft or violence aimed at getting money and food here. Criminal penalties won’t suppress fraud as well as many might imagine.

Employers hiring workers in the future will be required to use the newly created Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information, and Electronic Verification of Employment (BELIEVE) System as a means of verification. There will be strict employer penalties for failure to participate in the BELIEVE system after being notified of a requirement to do so by the Secretary of Homeland Security or after the BELIEVE system has been fully implemented nationwide such that it is required to be used by all employers.

E-Verify has too many problems. Renaming it will help!

Prospective employees will present a machine-readable, fraud proof, biometric Social Security card to their employers, who will swipe the cards through a card-reader to confirm the cardholder’s identity and work authorization.

More than two pages into the summary, we’re back to the basics of the card and what it does. We already know that the card is not fraud proof. What’s new here is that employers will have to have card readers—an additional inconvenience, expense, and barrier to hiring new employees.

What this fails to mention is that the machine will have to be able to process machine biometrics—fingerprint reading or iris scanning, for example. These are not inexpensive machines, their use will probably require training, and they must have very high accuracy in all conditions or they will produce a mountainous administrative burden on employers and workers.

We also learn from this—again—that this will not be a simple work authorization system, but a national identity system. Running the card through a machine (and checking the bearer’s biometrics) will reveal identity.

Again, we’re looking at mission creep: With all these cards and machines in place, able to prove identity, why wouldn’t they be applied to new purposes like airline security? Checking in at hotels? Confirming identity at office building entrances? Administration of government benefits? Proof of identity in credit card transactions? Night and weekend access to office buildings and parking lots? Traffic stops?

The cardholder’s work authorization will be verified by matching a digital encryption key contained within the card to a digital encryption key contained within the work authorization database being searched.

Here’s a new notion—the use of encryption. But how encryption would be used is far from clear. Presumably, a signal that the bearer of the card is work authorized (referred to here as an “encryption key”) would be released by the card and matched against information (also referred to as an “encryption key”) in a database. It is highly doubtful that either item of data is actually an encryption key, as an encryption key is the code used to encrypt or decrypt the information you are trying to work with. Most likely, work authorization data will be encrypted on the card. Somehow or another, once presented, that encrypted data will be decrypted and show that the bearer of the card is work authorized.

This contradicts statements above saying that the system won’t require access to a central database. Perhaps it envisions public key encryption, in which a private key scrambles the work authorization data and a public key de-scrambles it. I doubt that PKI is up to this. If the private key were released or reverse-engineered, the system would fail because forgery of work authorizations would then be easy.

This project has a long way to go before it articulates a card system that can securely confirm work authorization without connecting to a database.

The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the micro-processing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer.

This is confirmation that it is not just a card reader, but a biometric reader. It is also confirmation that the system will confirm identity, not just work authorization. Prepare for mission creep.

Two-and-a-half pages of summary information reveals little more than the wall of complexities behind the Democrats’ plan for a national identity system. It repeats as an incantation the words “fraud-proof” even while it admits that criminal penalties are needed to tamp down fraud. The summary ratchets back from the dubious claim made earlier that there wouldn’t be a national biometric database—there almost certainly would be. The summary confirms that the card system would be used to confirm identity, not just work authorization. That sets it up for mission creep—expansion to new uses and data collections that plunge us into a surveillance society.

Indeed the mission creep begins with this very plan. When employer sanctions don’t sweep the country clean of visa overstayers, these ID cards will be used to hunt them down inside the country. From page five:

In addition to increasing border enforcement, this proposal will substantially enhance our capabilities to detect, apprehend, and remove persons who entered the United States unlawfully and persons who entered lawfully on temporary visas but failed to leave the country when designated.

Will these removal plans be carried out through a system of checkpoints at which all Americans have to present their national ID card? Will private providers of financial services, health care, housing, or retailing be required to check a person’s national ID card? Or will the entire nation adopt an Arizona-style law that requires law enforcement to examining the papers of people “reasonably suspected” of remaining in the country illegally?

The Democrats’ national ID plan raises all these questions and many more. My colleague Dan Griswold has the true answer:  To control the border, you must first reform immigration law.

Don’t BELIEVE the Hype—Though Unformed, the Democrats’ National ID Plan Is Rife With Threats to Privacy and Civil Liberties is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Arizona legislature recently sent Senate Bill 1070 to the governor.

According to this summary from the Arizona legislature, the bill would require Arizona officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of any person with whom they have “lawful contact” where reasonable suspicion exists regarding the immigration status of the person. Any person arrested in Arizona would also have to have their immigration status established and verified with the federal government before they were released.

The documents that can be used to prove legal immigration status under the bill include a valid Arizona driver license, a valid Arizona nonoperating identification license, a valid tribal enrollment card or other tribal identification, or a valid federal-, state- or local-government-issued identification, if the issuing entity requires proof of legal presence before issuance.

If the governor signs the bill, what creates “reasonable suspicion” about immigration status is a question that will have lawyers busy for years.

I’m interested in how well practiced Arizonans and Arizona government officials will become at checking the papers of people in their state. I have little to worry about, of course, because I’m not an illegal immigrant.

UCSB history professor Harold Marcuse maintains a fascinating web page about Martin Niemöller’s famous quotation. There are many versions of it in its long history, and there may yet be more.

“Papers, Please” in Arizona is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Congress can and should pass comprehensive immigration reform in 2010. Any legislation worthy of the name would:

1) offer legalization to undocumented workers who have been here for several years, pass a security check, and pay a reasonable fine and back taxes;

2) create a temporary-visa program sufficient to meet future labor needs of a growing economy; and

3) enforce the law against those who still insist on working outside the system, but in a way that does not restrict the freedom of American citizens.

Reform would reduce illegal immigration by offering a legal alternative. It would tighten border security by allowing U.S. agents to focus on intercepting real criminals and terrorists, not dishwashers and gardeners. And it would expand output, investment, and job opportunities for middle-class Americans. Polls show a majority of Americans will accept the three-fold approach to reform. Recent elections confirm that support for reform is a modest plus with swing voters, and a huge plus with Hispanics.

This is an issue where both major parties can work together to fix our immigration system in a way that boosts the economy, enhances security, and expands liberty.

For more, see Cato’s research on immigration.

Three Steps to Comprehensive Immigration Reform is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Lawmakers in Arizona must believe the state’s law enforcement officers have too much time on their hands.

A bill passed by the legislature yesterday will make it a misdemeanor to be in Arizona without proper immigration paperwork. It also directs Arizona police to question anyone about their immigration status if they have reason to suspect the person is in the country illegally. Failure to produce the proper documents could result in arrest, a $2,500 fine, and up to six months in jail.

Making and enforcing immigration law is a federal responsibility. State and local police should focus their resources on preventing crime and apprehending real criminals who pose a danger to public safety.

Police in Arizona seem to agree. According to an Associated Press report,

[The bill] is opposed by police chiefs, who worry that the law would be too costly, that it would distract them from dealing with more serious problems, and that it would sow such distrust among immigrants that they would not cooperate with officers investigating other crimes.

The right response to illegal immigration should be to change our laws to expand opportunities for legal immigration. As our numerous studies have shown, a comprehensive immigration reform bill in Congress that included a robust temporary worker program would reduce illegal immigration, make the U.S. border more secure, and boost our economy.

Arizona Turns Immigrant Workers into Criminals is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There is much to commend in the op-ed on immigration reform that Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) published in this morning’s Washington Post. Unfortunately, they lead with their worst idea: a biometric national ID card, mandatory for all American workers.

Here’s the good: “Americans overwhelmingly oppose illegal immigration and support legal immigration,” they say. “Throughout our history, immigrants have contributed to making this country more vibrant and economically dynamic.”

Their plan includes problem-solving proposals: “creating a process for admitting temporary workers” and “implementing a tough but fair path to legalization.” The latter would reduce the population of illegal aliens in the U.S.—good—and the former would reduce the need to enter illegally in the first place—also good.

Joined with the enhanced border security they propose, these ideas would address the immigration challenge as well as anyone knows how. (Details matter, and my colleagues will have more to say, I’m sure.)

But then there is their gratuitous national ID proposal for all American workers, and stepped up interior enforcement. “Interior enforcement” is a euphemism for “rounding up illegal workers” under some administrations and “raiding employers” under others.

This is the most specific Senator Schumer has ever been about his biometric national ID proposal, though he’s had it in mind since at least 2007. But it is hardly satisfactory, and the claim there will be no national ID database is almost certainly not true.

Here is the paragraph that captures the senators’ plan:

We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card. Each card’s unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone’s information. The cards would not contain any private information, medical information, nor tracking devices. The card will be a high-tech version of the Social Security card that citizens already have.

I’ll parse the senators’ description of their national ID plan here. In a later post, I’ll examine how the Schumer-Graham biometric national ID stacks up in terms of privacy, cost, and other considerations. Of course, in the decade or two it will take to build this extravagant national identity system, we will learn much more than I can predict.

We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card.

First, let there be no doubt that this is a national ID card. As I’ve written in past, a national ID has three characteristics: It is national—this is. It’s practically or legally required—this is. And it’s for identification—yep.

Students of card security will recognize one of the adjectives in the sentence as rather extravagant.  No, it’s not “high-tech”—that’s a throwaway. The extravagant claim is “fraud-proof.”

The senators may mean one of  three things, only one of which might be true. All three have to be true or their implication of a bullet-proof card system is false:

1) Impervious to fraud in issuance. Issuance is the weakest link in card security. Today at the hundreds and hundreds of DMVs across the country, ingenious young people (under 21—understand their motivation?) regularly submit identity documents falsely—siblings’ birth certificates or driver’s licenses, for example, or fake Social Security cards, utility bills, and such. Illegal aliens do too. Many DMV workers are gulls. Some can be made willing gulls for the right price. The same will be true of Social Security Administration workers. If the motivation is high enough, there is no practical way of making a national identity document fraud-proof in issuance.

2) Impervious to alteration. With various printing methods, secure card stocks, and encryption, card security is the easiest to do. It is possible to create a card that can’t be altered except at extraordinary expense.

3) Impervious to forgery. Odd though it may seem, technology does not govern whether a card can be forged—motivation does. Any card can can be forged if the price is right. Were a single card to provide entrée  to work in the United States, it’s virtually guaranteed that criminal enterprises would forge the physical card and defeat the digital systems they need to.

The idea of a “fraud-proof” card (in whatever sense the senators mean) sounds nice. But it doesn’t bear up under the stresses to be encountered by a national ID system that governs whether people can earn a living (and probably much more). During the decade or more that this system is being designed and implemented, new ways of attacking biometrics and encryption will emerge. A reasonably ”fraud-proof” card today is not still fraud-proof in 2020.

Each card’s unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone’s information.

It is possible to have a biometric card without a biometric database. The card would hold a digital description of the relevant biometric (such as fingerprint or iris scan). That algorithm would be compared by the card or by a reader to the person presenting it, determining wether it should be accepted as theirs.

The promise not to create a biometric database is a welcome one. The senators should require—in law—that the enrollment process and technology be fully open and transparent so that non-government technologists can ensure that the system does not secretly or mistakenly collect biometrics.

But the promise not to create a national identity database is almost certainly false.

Let’s review how an identity card is issued at a motor vehicle office today: People take the required documents to a DMV and hand them over. If the DMV accepts their documentation, the DMV creates a file about the person containing at least the material that will be printed on the card—including the person’s photograph. Then the DMV gives the person a card.

What would happen if DMVs didn’t keep this file? A couple of things—things that make the senators’ claim not to be creating a national identity database highly doubtful.

If there were no file and a card were lost or stolen, for example, the person would have to return to the card issuer again—with all the documents—and run through the entire process again. Because they have databases, DMVs today can produce a new ID and mail it to the address of record based on a phone call or Internet visit. (They each have their own databases—much better than a single database or databases networked together.)

If no file exists, multiple people could use the very same documents to create ID card after ID card after ID card in the same name but with different biometrics. Workers in the card issuing office could accept bribes with near impunity because there would be no documents proving that they had issued cards wrongly. Criminal use of the system would swamp it.

So that they can provide customer service, and for security reasons, state DMVs keep information about license holders, including a biometric of a sort—a photograph. Senators Schumer and Graham may think that they are designing a database-free biometric identity system—such a thing can exist—but the realities they confront will drive it to become a full-scale biometric national identity database.

The cards would not contain any private information, medical information, nor tracking devices.

This is a welcome pledge, and to fulfill it, they should bar—in law—the use of writeable chips or RFID chips. And there is no way to prevent the card itself from acting as a tracking device. It will be a pointer to private medical information, financial information, and much more.

Understand that the Social Security number is an identifier. It is already used in government, throughout the financial services system, and in much of health care to administer services and benefits, and to perform surveillance (both for good or for bad).

With a uniform biometric Social Security card in the hands of every worker, the card would be demanded at more and more points in society. Americans would have to present their national ID when they use credit cards, when they check into hotels, at bars, in airports, pharmacies, doctors’ offices, and so on.

A card may contain only a biometric algorithm and a Social Security number—unlikely though that may be. It will still act as a tracking device when it integrates with the card readers and databases that grow up around it.

The card will be a high-tech version of the Social Security card that citizens already have.

This claim—to be making a simple, sensible change to the Social Security card—is wrong. The biometric national identification scheme Senators Schumer and Graham propose is much, much more than a “high-tech” Social Security card. It’s the biggest, most difficult identity system ever proposed. It will take decades and tens or hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to build.

About the only similarity between today’s Social Security card and the biometric national ID card these senators propose is that they’re both rectangular.

In an earlier post, I called Senator Graham’s support of Schumer’s national ID plan inexplicable (before taking a stab at explaining it). Seeing the outline of their entire proposal, which would alleviate various pressures and begin a welcome transition back toward the rule of law in the immigration area, I am truly at a loss to understand why they would attach this grauitous and punitive plan to force law-abiding American citizens into a biometric national ID system.

Senators, why not do it without the national ID?

Schumer and Graham on Immigration Reform: Why Not Do it Without the Biometric National ID? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The good news is that a bill has been introduced in the House this week under the broad heading of immigration reform. Even during a recession, Congress should be working to change our immigration system to reflect the longer-term needs of our economy for foreign-born workers.

The bad news is that the actual bill put in the hopper by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-IL, on Tuesday would do nothing to solve the related problems of illegal immigration and the long-term needs of our economy.

As I argued in a recent blog post and a Washington Times op-ed, immigration reform must include expanded opportunities for legal immigration in the future through a temporary worker visa.

Any so-called reform that is missing this third leg will be doomed to fail. We will simply be repeating the mistakes of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal workers and ramped up enforcement, but made no provision for future workers. Rep. Jeff Flake, R-AZ, agrees.

Disappointing Start for Immigration Reform is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• In the past eight months, the unemployment rate has jumped from 7.2 percent to 10.2 percent. Here’s why.

• Three trillion reasons to hope the Senate is not as fiscally reckless as their counterparts in the House on health care reform.

• Obama a federalist? Not quite: “Not yet a year into his administration, Obama’s record on 10th Amendment issues is already clear: He’ll let the states have their way when their policies please blue team sensibilities and he’ll call in the feds when they don’t.” More here.

• It’s time to get immigration reform right: “Republican leaders need to liberate themselves from the Lou Dobbs minority within their own ranks that will oppose any legalization. Democratic leaders need to face down their labor-union constituency that opposes any workable temporary-visa program. Working together, President Obama and a bipartisan majority in Congress can seize the current opportunity to reform the immigration system and finally fix the problem of illegal immigration.”

• Podcast: “Preventing the Next Fort Hood Shooting“

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

An article published this week by National Review magazine blames the many problems of California on—take a guess—high taxes, over-regulation of business, runaway state spending, an expansive welfare state? Try none of the above. The article, by Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute, puts the blame on the backs of low-skilled, illegal immigrants from Mexico and the federal government for not keeping them out.

Titled “Catching Up to Mexico: Illegal immigration is depleting California’s human capital and ravaging its economy,” the article endorses high-skilled immigration to the state while rejecting the influx of “the poorly educated, the unskilled, and the illiterate” immigrants that enter illegally from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

Before swallowing the article’s thesis, consider two thoughts:

One, if low-skilled, illegal immigration is the single greatest cause of California’s woes, how does the author explain the relative success of Texas? As a survey in the July 11 issue of The Economist magazine explained, smaller-government Texas has avoided many of the problems of California while outperforming most of the rest of the country in job creation and economic growth. And Texas has managed to do this with an illegal immigrant population that rivals California’s as a share of its population.

Two, low-skilled immigrants actually enhance the human capital of native-born Americans by allowing us to move up the occupational ladder to jobs that are more productive and better paying. In a new study from the Cato Institute, titled “Restriction or Legalization? Measuring the Economic Benefits of Immigration Reform,” this phenomenon is called the “occupational mix effect” and it translates into tens of billions of dollars of benefits to U.S. households.

Our new study, authored by economists Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer, found that legalization of low-skilled immigration would boost the incomes of American households by $180 billion, while further restricting such immigration would reduce the incomes of U.S. families by $80 billion.

That is a quarter of a trillion dollar difference between following the policy advice of National Review and that of the Cato Institute. Last time I checked, that is still real money, even in Washington.

Have Mexican Dishwashers Brought California to Its Knees? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama is meeting today with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to talk about reforming our broken immigration system. The challenge for both parties will be whether they can overcome opposition within their respective bases to expanding legal immigration.

For Republicans, the chief opposition remains the faction of talk-radio-driven conservatives who just don’t like immigration, period, especially when it comes from Latin America. For Democrats, who now run Washington, the chief opposition to allowing more foreign workers to enter the country legally is represented by organized labor.

As the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, advocates of immigration reform “worry that Democrats will defer to the AFL-CIO on the issue of legal immigration. The labor confederation has opposed a robust guest-worker program or higher levels of legal immigration, fearing they would depress wages. A larger labor presence would splinter the coalition of business and pro-immigration groups that embraced past immigration efforts, only to see them falter in the Senate.”

As I’ve argued consistently in the past, immigration reform is not worth pursuing if it does not include expanding future flows of legal immigrants, both highly skilled and lower-skilled workers.  If Congress confines itself to legalizing the 8 million or so workers already here illegally, with a vow to get tougher on enforcement, then we are just repeating the mistake of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

We will know if President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress are serious about fixing the problem of illegal immigration if they face down their labor-union allies and embrace a workable, market-oriented expansion of legal immigration. Otherwise, we are in for more futility, frustration and failure.

Are Democrats Serious about Immigration Reform? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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:

Does the Obama Administration support the implementation of the Real ID Act?

(Hope not . . . .)

Congress has passed two bills that set Real ID standards for driver’s licenses in all U.S. jurisdictions.

REAL ID was a federal law that Congress passed in haste as an attachment to a military spending bill in early 2005. To me, “REAL ID standards” are the standards in the REAL ID Act. I’m not sure what other bill the post refers to.

Given the legitimate fear of REAL ID creating a federal national ID database, section 547 of the Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009 barred the creation of a new federal database or federal access to state databases with the funds in that bill. (Thus, these things will be done with other funds later.)

The Court Security Improvement Act allowed federal judges and Supreme Court Justices to withhold their addresses from the REAL ID database system, evidently because the courts don’t believe the databases would be secure.

And in the last Congress, bills were introduced to repeal REAL ID in both the House and Senate. Congress has been backing away from REAL ID since it was rammed through, with Senators like Joe Lieberman (I-CT) calling REAL ID unworkable.

It’s unclear what the import of the sentence is, but if it’s trying to convey that there is a settled consensus around the REAL ID law, that is not supported by its treatment in Congress.

The Real ID legislation does not create a federal identification card, but it does set minimum security standards for driver’s licenses.

This sentence is correct, but deceptive.

REAL ID sets federal standards for state identification cards and drivers’ licenses, refusing them federal acceptance if they don’t meet these standards. Among those standards is uniformity in the data elements and a nationally standardized machine readable technology. Interoperable databases and easily scanned cards mean that state-issued cards would be the functional equivalent of a federally issued card.

People won’t be fooled if their national ID cards have the flags of their home states on them. When I testified to the Michigan legislature in 2007, I parodied the argument that a state-issued card is not a national ID card: “My car didn’t hit you — the bumper did!”

All states have either agreed to comply with these standards or have applied for an extension of the deadline.

It’s true that all states have either moved toward complying or not, but that’s not very informative. What matters is that a dozen states have passed legislation barring their own participation in the national ID plan. A couple of states received deadline extensions from the Department of Homeland Security despite refusing to ask for them. Things are not going well for REAL ID.

Secure identification cards will make fraudulent documents more difficult to obtain and will also simplify employers’ efforts to check documents when verifying employer eligibility.

It’s true that REAL ID would make it a little bit harder to get – or actually to use – fraudulent documents, because it would add some very expensive checks into the processes states use when they issue cards.

It’s not secure identification cards that make fraudulent documents harder to obtain – the author of this post has the security problems jumbled. But, worse, he or she excludes mentioning that a national ID makes it more valuable to use fraudulent documents. When a thing is made harder to do, but proportionally more valuable to do, you’ll see more of it. REAL ID is not a recipe for a secure identity system; it’s a recipe for a more expensive and invasive, but less secure identity system.

Speaking of invasive, this sentence is a confession that REAL ID is meant to facilitate background checks on American workers before they can work. This is a process I wrote about in a paper subtitled “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.” The dream of easy federal background checks on all American workers will never materialize, and we wouldn’t want that power in the hands of the federal government even if we could have it.

Real ID is a sensible protection against identify fraud.

The Department of Homeland Security’s own economic analysis of REAL ID noted that only 28% of all reported incidents of identity theft in 2005 required the presentation of an identification document like a driver’s license. And it said REAL ID would reduce those frauds “only to the extent that the [REAL ID] rulemaking leads to incidental and required use of REAL ID documents in everyday transactions, which is an impact that also depends on decisions made by State and local governments and the private sector.”

Translation: REAL ID would have a small, but speculative effect on identity fraud.

Congress is set to introduce legislation next week that could largely repeal the Real ID.

The bill I’ve seen is structured just like REAL ID was, and it requires states to create a national ID just like REAL ID did. REAL ID is dying, but the bill would revive REAL ID, trying to give it a different name.

Some groups oppose this version of REAL ID because it takes longer to drive all Americans into a national ID system and frustrates their plans to do background checks on all American workers. But it’s still the REAL ID Act’s basic plan for a national ID.

The Administration should put pressure on Congress to ensure that this legislation does not effectively eliminate the Real ID standards.

Why the administration would pressure Congress to maintain the national ID law in place – by any name – is beyond me. REAL ID is unworkable, unwanted, and unfixable.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano signed legislation as Arizona’s governor to reject the REAL ID Act. Her predecessor at DHS, Michael Chertoff, talked tough about implementing the law but came up just shy of lighting the paper bag in which he left it on Napolitano’s doorstep.

The REAL ID revival bill that is being so widely discussed is likely to be both the national ID plan that so many states have already rejected and deeply unsatisfying to the anti-immigrant crowd. Congress rarely fails to grasp a lose-lose opportunity like this, so I expect it will be introduced and to see it’s sponsors award themselves a great deal of self-congratulations for their courageous work. You can expect that to receive a fisking here too.

Questions for Heritage: REAL ID is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Federal Study Supports School Vouchers

Last week, a U.S. Department of Education study revealed that students participating in a Washington D.C. voucher pilot program outperformed peers attending public schools.

According to The Washington Post, the study found that “students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school.” In a statement, education secretary Arne Duncan said that the Obama administration “does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.”

Why then did the Obama administration “let Congress slash the jugular of DC’s school voucher program despite almost certainly having an evaluation in hand showing that students in the program did better than those who tried to get vouchers and failed?”

The answer, says Cato scholar Neal McCluskey, lies in special interests and an unwillingness to embrace change after decades of maintaining the status quo:

It is not just the awesome political power of special interests, however, that keeps the monopoly in place. As Terry Moe has found, many Americans have a deep, emotional attachment to public schooling, one likely rooted in a conviction that public schooling is essential to American unity and success. It is an inaccurate conviction — public schooling is all-too-often divisive where homogeneity does not already exist, and Americans successfully educated themselves long before “public schooling” became widespread or mandatory — but the conviction nonetheless is there. Indeed, most people acknowledge that public schooling is broken, but feel they still must love it.

Susan L. Aud and Leon Michos found the program saved the city nearly $8 million in education costs in a 2006 Cato study that examined the fiscal impact of the voucher program.

To learn more about the positive effect of school choice on poor communities around the world, join the Cato Institute on April 15 to discuss James Tooley’s new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.

Obama Announces New Direction on Immigration

The New York Times reports, “President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.”

In the immigration chapter of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers, Cato trade analyst Daniel T. Griswold offered suggestions on immigration policy, which include:

• Expanding current legal immigration quotas, especially for employment-based visas.
• Creating a temporary worker program for lower-skilled workers to meet long-term labor demand and reduce incentives for illegal immigration.
• Refocusing border-control resources to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country.

In a 2002 Cato Policy Analysis, Griswold made the case for allowing Mexican laborers into the United States to work.

For more on the argument for open borders, watch Jason L. Riley of The Wall Street Journal editorial board speak about his book, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.

In Case You Couldn’t Join Us
Cato hosted a number of fascinating guests recently to speak about new books, reports and projects.

• Salon writer Glenn Greenwald discussed a new Cato study that examines the successful drug decriminalization program in Portugal.

• Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute explained his project to build self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to break free of national governments and start their own societies on the ocean.

• Dambisa Moyo, author of the book Dead Aid, spoke about her research that shows how government-to-government aid fails. She proposed an “aid-free solution” to development, based on the experience of successful African countries.

Find full-length videos to all Cato events on Cato’s events archive page.

Also, don’t miss Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast with legal policy analyst David Rittgers on Obama’s surge strategy in Afghanistan.

Week in Review: Successful Voucher Programs, Immigration Debates and a New Path for Africa is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog