Document can curb the hiring of illegal migrants
azcentral.com
Apr. 3, 2005 12:00 AM
Twenty years ago you might have heard this conversation from the left about efforts to enforce laws against hiring illegal immigrants.
Well-educated Anglo woman: What's wrong with a national ID card?
Well-educated Latina: People like me would get asked to show it, and people who look like you wouldn't.
End of discussion.
Conventional wisdom and liberal guilt decreed that establishing a national ID card for employment purposes would be discriminatory.
Then there were the Big Brother arguments from the paranoid right. You'll hear the sound of jackboots, they said, as once-free Americans start lining up to show their papers.
Amid the hyperventilating, the fact that we already had a national identification card got lost. It's called the Social Security card. Everybody - Anglo, jackbooted or Latina - is required to show it or other forms of identification to prove eligibility to work. Unfortunately, those documents are easily forged and can be cheaply purchased by illegal immigrants.
That, coupled with the hunger of American business for cheap immigrant labor is why we have an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in this country.
It is the reason 589,831 people were arrested trying to cross the Mexican border illegally into Arizona in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
It is why each summer brings a record number of immigrant deaths in Arizona's harsh, southern desert.
This month's convergence of newly assigned Border Patrol agents, Minuteman Project good old boys, immigrant rights protesters and out-of-state reporters who don't know a cactus from a pair of tweezers won't deter many illegal immigrants.
The criminal smugglers who get rich transporting America's illegal workforce across the Arizona-Mexico border will simply find another crossing point. They will do it with the same speed and determination with which you find a way around an accident that blocks your usual route to work.
This, as Rep. Jeff Flake puts it, is why "we don't have enough troops in the world to secure that border."
Flake, Rep. Jim Kolbe and Sen. John McCain offered a bill in the past session to expand the minuscule and inadequate guest-worker programs we currently have. McCain and Sen. Edward Kennedy are working on a guest-worker bill for this session.
Despite the lip service President Bush offers to the idea, a large guest-worker program is a tough sell in Congress. And it's going to get tougher because establishing such a program without a national identification card would be a waste of time, money and political capital.
Such a card is key to eliminating the availability of jobs that will continue to lure illegal immigrants into the scorching desert unless the new system ensures that employers hire only those properly documented.
A national ID card would remove the discretion, or burden, employers currently have to accept or reject identification that a prospective employee offers. A secure ID card could be swiped just like a credit card to access a national database and reveal in seconds whether an applicant is eligible to work in this country.
There are real dangers, as Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, points out. The database would have to be free of the kind of errors that have long plagued federal immigration databases. There will have to be a way for individuals to check the accuracy of the information stored under their names and easily correct errors.
In addition, Americans deserve a verifiable commitment from Congress and the White House that information in the database is limited and specific to identification and employment. Uncle Sam has no business compiling your movie-rental preferences or library habits.
A bunch of suicidal terrorists demonstrated that Uncle Sam does have a legitimate national security interest in tracking immigrants and making sure people are who they say they are.
Rep. John Shadegg told The Arizona Republic's Editorial Board last week that the idea that this nation can do without a secure national ID is a "pre-9/11 notion."
Congress is tiptoeing in.
An intelligence-reform bill approved in December calls for looking into ways to secure Social Security cards. Another bill, sponsored by Rep. David Dreier, calls for phasing in counterfeit-proof Social Security cards.
This gets the debate moving toward a solution.
But the blame-the-immigrant crowd is kicking up a toxic dust cloud. As usual.
An ersatz national ID card is established by Rep. James Sensenbrenner's REAL ID bill, which was passed by the House and is widely, and rightly, condemned for its draconian approach to those seeking asylum. This bill takes the wrong approach in many ways, but I'll stick to the problems with the ID portion.
It makes states responsible for verifying immigration status before issuing driver's licenses and mandates security features. Those state-issued licenses would then become the nation's ID card. States that don't go along lose federal funding.
The federal government already burdens states with the costs of Uncle Sam's failure to enforce immigration laws. States don't need to foot the bill for a national ID card, too.
In addition, people who live in states with Looney Tunes legislatures such as Arizona would face the additional challenge of seeing lawmakers sputter libertarian platitudes and opt out of the system, leaving residents with no acceptable picture ID to show at the airport.
Any national ID card should be uniform, standard and issued by the federal government, just like Social Security cards. But unlike today's Social Security cards, they should be as secure as modern technology can make them.
The argument that such a card would lead to discrimination is knee-jerk goofy. Everyone is required to show documentation now to get a job or board a plane. There are scores of civil rights attorneys ready to slap a lawsuit on anybody who singles out particular groups for special scrutiny. In fact, fear of such lawsuits is one of the justifications offered by employers who currently accept obviously fake IDs.
Besides, when it comes to undermining the reputation of Latinos as a group, the constant drip of negative news stories about illegal immigrants has a far greater potential to create an atmosphere where discrimination flourishes. The failure to control illegal immigration damages the image of second- and third-generation U.S. Latinos and legal Mexican immigrants far more than any ID card could.
And as for the black helicopter crowd and the leave-me-alone libertarians: Listen, guys, the private data-warehouses and credit-reporting bureaus already have more information on you than George Orwell ever dreamed possible. Go fight them. Please.
In the meantime, a real solution to illegal immigration is going to require moving beyond denial into a new age when showing identification is not about government intrusion. It's about enforcing immigration laws and keeping the country safe. |
