Proposed bill calls for ID card for U.S. workers to curb illegal immigration
Advocates of immigration reform are pushing for a bill in the Senate which would create a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain; the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand; employers will not be able to hire applicants who do not present a valid ID
Americans have never warmed up to the idea of a national ID, so it would be interesting to see how they react to this: Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have decided that there is one sure way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
Wall Street Journal’s Laura Meckler writes that under the controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
The bill is sponsored Senators Chuck Schumer (D.-New York) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.
“It’s the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking,” Schumer told Meckler. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. “If you say they can’t get a job when they come here, you’ll stop it.”
Privacy advocates criticize the idea. “It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people’s privacy,” Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said. “We’re not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We’re also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification.”
Senator Graham says he respects those concerns but disagrees. “We’ve all got Social Security cards,” he said. “They’re just easily tampered with. Make them tamper-proof. That’s all I’m saying.”
Meckler notes that U.S. employers now have the option of using an online system called E-Verify to check whether potential employees are in the U.S. legally, but there are questions about the effectiveness of the system( see “How Accurate is E-Verify?” 2 March 2010 HSNW).
Mackler quotes a person familiar with the legislative planning to say that the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand. It would be required of all workers, including teenagers, but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs, the person said. The card requirement also would be phased in among employers, beginning with industries that typically rely on illegal-immigrant labor.
