Thread: Poll: Will national ID card be needed to ensure a legal work

Friday, July 24, 2009

Poll: Will national ID card be needed to ensure a legal workforce?

Letter from Washington: Lawmakers wrestle with what system would be best to weed out illegal employees

Dena Bunis
Washington Bureau Chief
The Orange County Register
dbunis@ocregister.com

Would you be willing to give up some privacy to ensure that there are no illegal immigrants in the country's workplaces?

That may end up being one of the central questions in the debate over comprehensive immigration reform.

Two congressional panels held hearings this week to consider the best way to determine whether the U.S. workforce is legal. In particular, lawmakers were questioning whether the current voluntary government program, E-Verify, is good enough.

E-Verify, which was authored back in 1996 by Rep. Ken Calvert, is by no means a foolproof system.

Calvert, R-Corona, has been pushing for years to make the system permanent but opponents say the databases the web-based program relies on contain too many errors.

Two states – Arizona and Georgia – have passed laws requiring all employers to use the system. And Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced two weeks ago that the Obama administration was going to go ahead with the Bush plan to require all federal contractors to be part of the system.

As of last week, 137,463 employers have enrolled in E-Verify, 10,687 of them in California. The latest numbers available for Orange County date back to January, when there were 467 companies participating.

Federal officials say new companies are coming on line at the rate of 1,000 a week. That number is expected to grow in September, once the federal contractor provision kicks in.

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Would you support a national ID card if it meant a legal workforce?
Yes. With the Internet, privacy is a thing of the past anyway

No. I don't want Big Brother watching

Don't know. Need to hear more about such a proposal.

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Fountain Valley construction contractor Jim Rieff, who has signed up, would like to see all employers use E-Verify.

"I'm totally in favor of it,'' Rieff told me. He's a small business guy and so far has only had to run one employee through E-Verify. He did have a problem that time. In fact it took eight weeks for the employee to be cleared.

Even so, Rieff supports the system because he says there needs to be a way to make sure U.S. citizens aren't pushed out by illegal workers.

Rieff says he knows he has lost some construction bids because competitors hire illegal workers who work for much less.

But immigration advocates and some business groups have pushed back, saying as long as there are errors in the databases used to check a person's Social Security number, the government shouldn't mandate the system for all employers. They say if employers are forced to use the system they may just take the path of least resistance and racially profile workers.

Here's how the system is supposed to work: After an employer offers someone a job, they input the person's Social Security number into the E-Verify system. In more than 96 percent of the cases, within a few seconds the computer tells the employer the number matches the name and all is well. If that doesn't happen, a so-called tentative nonconfirmation comes back and then the employee has to call the Social Security Administration or DHS and find out what's wrong.

Even if this system was 100 percent accurate there is a fundamental flaw in it. It doesn't catch people who have bought or stolen a valid Social Security number.

In 2006, an immigration raid on the Swift meat processing plant in Texas picked up 1,200 illegal workers despite the fact that Swift was enrolled in E-Verify.

Newport Beach immigration lawyer Mitch Wexler says his clients like the E-Verify idea but are skittish about using it because of the errors in the data bases.

Michael Aytes, who runs U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told committee members about the various improvements they are making to combat identity fraud.

DHS has added green card and work permit photos to the system so employers can verify a worker's identity. And they are planning on adding passport photos as well.

But it's estimated that fewer than 10 percent of the public have passports so most workers won't have photos in the system.

Ideally, DHS would like to strike deals with all 50 states to get driver's license photos embedded in E-Verify. But if the reluctance of states to participate in the Real ID program is any indication, those agreements would be hard to come by. (Real ID was a law Congress passed to make driver's licenses more secure; so far it hasn't been implemented)

The concern over identity theft has led some lawmakers – most notably Sen. Chuck Schumer, the new chairman of the immigration subcommittee, to push for an employment verification system that includes some biometric feature.

Biometrics is a fancy word for identification using a picture, fingerprint, or some sort of facial recognition. The technology for these techniques has improved greatly in recent years and while still costly, the price tags have been dropping as this industry becomes more competitive.

But that then leads me back to the initial question. Would Americans push back on having to get what would essentially be a national ID card?

Former INS Commissioner James Ziglar, who has run a company that designs biometric identification systems, told Schumer's subcommittee that more and more Americans are having to use such systems in their workplaces. And Lynden Melmed, an immigration expert who used to advise Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, on immigration issues and was general counsel for USCIS, told the panel that Americans are now more comfortable with the use of technology and might not balk so much at a card-based system.

So maybe the specter of Big Brother Watching won't dominate the debate. We'll see.

Several lawmakers and witnesses at these hearings called an employer verification system the linchpin of a comprehensive immigration reform.

The last time around, in 2006 and 2007, employment verification was listed in every bill but lawmakers never got down to the nitty-gritty of how these systems would be structured.

They're not likely to make that mistake again. This time, at least Schumer, D-N.Y., who will be the bill's architect in the Senate, knows that the public wants confidence that enforcement is front and center of any reform and I'll bet he'll be sure to get agreement on a solid verification system before tackling the more contentious issue of legalizing the undocumented immigrants here now.

We'll be watching.

Contact the writer: (202) 628-6381 or dbunis@ocregister.com

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/syst ... ers-number

Would you support a national ID card if it meant a legal workforce?

Yes. With the Internet, privacy is a thing of the past anyway
67%

No. I don't want Big Brother watching
21%

Don't know. Need to hear more about such a proposal.
11%


Total Votes: 227
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Vote at this link:

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/syst ... ers-number

Would you support a national ID card if it meant a legal workforce?
Yes. With the Internet, privacy is a thing of the past anyway
67%

No. I don't want Big Brother watching
21%

Don't know. Need to hear more about such a proposal.
12%


Total Votes: 233

My response: Don't know. Need to hear more about such a proposal.

Would you support a national ID card if it meant a legal workforce?


Yes. With the Internet, privacy is a thing of the past anyway
68%

No. I don't want Big Brother watching
20%

Don't know. Need to hear more about such a proposal.
11%


Total Votes: 254

Would you support a national ID card if it meant a legal workforce?

Yes. With the Internet, privacy is a thing of the past anyway
68%

No. I don't want Big Brother watching
20%

Don't know. Need to hear more about such a proposal.
12%

Total Votes: 266

We already have a system in place, with a national ID card. It's E-verify and our social security card. Why re-invent the wheel, when we can IMPROVE E-verify.

I suspect the talk of a national ID card is mis-information, to delay or with draw support of E-verify. Think of the cost involved to sot up a new national, data system and issue new cards. Take the money and improve E-verify.

Force the IRS to only accept a single tax return, per social seurity numbver. Force the SSA to report to DHS, multiple uses of any SSN.

Improve what we have, don't lose ground by starting over.

Originally Posted by magyart

We already have a system in place, with a national ID card. It's E-verify and our social security card. Why re-invent the wheel, when we can IMPROVE E-verify.

I suspect the talk of a national ID card is mis-information, to delay or with draw support of E-verify. Think of the cost involved to sot up a new national, data system and issue new cards. Take the money and improve E-verify.

Force the IRS to only accept a single tax return, per social seurity numbver. Force the SSA to report to DHS, multiple uses of any SSN.

Improve what we have, don't lose ground by starting over.

The problem with the Social Security Card is that there is no picture, there are no finger prints, no physical description, no race, no sex, not even a date of birth so there is no way to know if the person presenting the card is the person named on the card.

I would be for the national ID card if it were made ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY for all businesses in this country to confirm right to work in this country. No card, no job!

While we're at it, I also want the national ID card made mandatory in order to vote in this country.

I agree with John Doe. The problem with the social security card and E-Verify ( don't get me wrong, i'm still all for E-Verify as it's better than nothing) is that it cannot tell you if the person presenting the card is actually the rightful owner of that number. If that card is a legitimate SS#, but stolen, that person is going to be allowed to work when they have no right to.

I often wonder how many of these illegals are using their anchor babies' social security number to get a job.

Would this be the same National ID card that the Obamacare bill mentions that will allow your bank accounts to be tracked? The same one that will take us to a cash less society?

I think, No thanks....

When the reigning powers give the illegals amnesty and forgiving all or their sins, so to speak, and bring them "out of the shadows" (political speak for - so we can track and tax them), I don't see how a National ID card will change very much concerning illegals.
I am hoping that this will not happen, but they are too greedy to let 30 million potential tax payers get away, plus the new ones that they can bring in. It seems to me lately that these people that we elected to represent us and to uphold the Constitution don't seem to care anything for the citizens in this country, just their own power.

They seem to want to replace the existing population because they are getting "older" and are a little worn out and they aren't producing as much. It also seems as though they don't want them to live long enough to use the money they have accumulated either. Death Tax?

Of course the administration would have more citizen bodies to count for international loans and a bigger tax revenue.

As was earlier noted, E-Verify would do that.

After getting a new SS card a few years ago, I was shocked that it was just a piece of card-stock with colorful threads in it. No picture, just a name and number. So someone steals the number and produces it along with my name going for a job in another state, guess who gets to pay the taxes that this identity thief won't. One woman in CA had her SSN used by 216 illegals and she had no clue until the IRS came after her for work done simultaneously in many states.
We already have a pseudo real ID with the SS card, so it would be simple to improve them to carry a picture, print and perhaps a biometric scan.
I have already had a credit card number violated by someone that probably grabbed it out of the ether while I swiped it. The company called to see if I had actually made $866 worth of calls to a phone sex line.
Our privacy has been eroding for years with cameras everywhere, phone conversations listened in on, cars with black boxes, companies knowing our spending patterns and our computers tracked as to what we search for and what sites we visit; our cellphones can get pinged even when they are turned off and even conversations within homes can be caught by beaming at the vibrations on the window glass (like the Russians did to the State Department in the 1970s).
The census takers are already marking every front door in the US as a GPS position, the IRS knows what we earn and our health problems are in some computer system (whose records may be processed in India) or hacked by thieves, as they have often done with gov't computers.
Privacy is long gone, including by those companies demanding a SSN to run a credit check on getting utilities or a cellphone.