Slashdot Mirror
US Immigration Bill May Bring a National Biometric ID Card
schwit1 sends this quote from the Wall Street Journal:
"Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain. Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal US workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker. ... A person familiar with the legislative planning said 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."
I must see your papers.
coffee | nose > keyboard
Why do we need another card? Seems to me that identity thieves have enough things to use already.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Ain't gonna happen.
Seriously though...this idea would likely work just as it is being advertised, but the privacy implications of this are astounding. Then again, we only have the illusion of privacy at this point here in the US, so we may as well stop fooling ourselves....
Remember kids, privacy != freedom
Living With a Nerd
Ok, it's not like you have to work...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is a National ID card. Call it what it is and be done with it, don't try to hide it as part of an immigration bill.
Who wants to bet that employers will just have a paper form to check off that they looked at your card rendering all the bio stuff useless?
The only reason I mention that is because a social security card is also 'required' for employment, although I lost mine when I was a kid and have never shown it to any of my employers.
I tell them I forgot it and they never ask again.
Mr. Cheney, we've advised you in the past to stop trolling internet forums!
I find this hard to believe. Obama already gets enough grief about
Obama's not in the senate. He hasn't been in the senate since he became president. This proposal is in the senate. Stop obama bashing.
Just because Schumer is meeting with Obama does not mean Obama is responsible for this idea. According ot the article, a source in the white house said they have no official stance.
Personally, this is the first time I have seen the democrats sell something properly. They are targetting this towards everyone, but their language is focusing on immigrants. Republicans are against national IDs, but they are more likely to be for it when we start throwing out the words "immigrants"
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Fine, congressmen should get the cards first. If they still like the idea after 6 years, let them try and foist it on the rest of us.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
and let in all the illegals than give those fucks in washington not only a national id card but one with biometric data. Worse than the Nazis and Soviets.
This is something that we need to harp on everytime the subject comes up. You cannot pass laws against illegal aliens to prevent them from working or participating in social programs, because we don't know who they are. You can only pass laws against everyone requiring them to prove they are a citizen. To require us to beg government approval before we can work or attend school, and hope there isn't a clerical error, or we never lose our papers at a bad time, or that the government won't someday extend this program to a larger scope.
There are no laws against illegal aliens, there are only laws stating that we are all assumed guilty of being illegal aliens until we prove ourselves innocent.
How long before people claim this as the mark of the Beast?
flight access [...] cashing checks or even credit cards [...]to track purchases [...] replacement for courtesy cards [...] health care, I mean we can now see that you buy WAY too much alcohol and cigarettes [...]the govt types will be able to come up with new, nifty ways to use a national id
Wow - just WOW. You are aware that with the exception of "national health care", EVERYTHING you mentioned would be done by private businesses, right? And if idiots like you get their way and there is no "national health care", private insurance companies could use it the same way, right?
Don't get me wrong - such an ID is a horrible idea - but it's a horrible idea because it will be abused by corporations.
(Yes, I know - all the libertardians will now proceed to mod me down and talk about how the invisible market fairy will make it all better.)
Ok, so worker will be required to get it when they next change jobs, and the industries that will be forced to require this first are the ones which typically hire the most illegals. The industries that hire the most illegals are construction, food service, etc. Those are also the industries where people are going to need to "change jobs" pretty soon, especially construction, due that sector having been hit the hardest by the economic issues. Yet again, this is just another way to control the poorer workers, all the while making them feel like having to register body scans to get a job building houses is for their own good 'cause it'll keep "illegals" from getting the jobs or "terrorists" from blowing them up.
How come its OK for capital to transfer across borders but labor can't move freely? How come I have to go through more trouble to get legal working status in another country than I do to invest in a foreign stock market? Is it because the nation state is the new lord's estate and they want to keep me on the manor? And to make sure we don't get any funny ideas, the Daddy Party tries to tell us we should hate our neighbors and do anything necessary to keep them out, fomenting racism and causing all sorts of animosity on both sides of the border, and the water, making sure that we're just as unwelcome abroad as they are here... screw this shit.
Well, this completely solves the illegal immigration problem! I mean, it's not like people will give illegal immigrants jobs if they don't have valid "job cards." After all, then they would need to pay the immigrants cash under the table or something. And, of course, these cards will be 100% forgery proof so immigrants won't be able to just get a fake ID.
Plus, there are no privacy concerns at all. I mean a card with your fingerprint and other personal information sitting right in your wallet? That's the most secure place I can think of. Nobody would ever lose their wallet or have it stolen. The card could never, ever go missing leading to identity theft. Nope. Simply impossible.
Oh and did I mention the "E-Verify" online system to check the ID card's validity. A stroke of genius! It's sure to be 100% hack-proof like all good government sites are.
Finally, there's no way this would ever be used for anything other than jobs. There will be no temptation for our completely honest politicians to extend this to travel, voting or any other use.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to clean my glasses. I think there's a smudge on the rose-colored lens.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
awesome - this is the first step towards automatic identification - soon we will have the RFID chip implanted under your skin so with one wave of your hand anyone can know everything about you!
i knew something like this would happen when immigration moved under the auspices of the Department of Fatherland Security.
and RFID is so much nicer than barcodes or numbers just written straight on the skin...
Driver's Licenses were, when initially set up, just that... a LICENSE. A piece of paper with a government seal saying you were approved to drive, just like a hunting license. No ID, no address and issued by the STATE.
A national ID, weakens the powers of the states and gives the federal government more control over your daily life... IE as in now you need papers just to seek employment and eventually to get healthcare that the government approves you to have.
As the saying goes, you can't throw a frog into a boiling cooking pot but you can sure turn up the heat over time and they won't know the difference...
But hey... chocolate rations are up.
Uhmm... Using a stolen SSN to get a job... Wouldn't that mean the social security benefits aquired over the years in that job would be credited to the original owner of that number?
And the income taxes that would be owed for said income....
This whole thing is pointless anyway. Does Congress really live in a fantasy land where illegal immigrants are hired to positions where they supply SSNs, drivers licenses, etc? In my experience the vast majority of businesses employing illegal labor do so by paying them in cash. "Come work with us for a day putting up drywall, there's a few sawbucks in it for you." No amount of biometrics will stop this.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The ID cards are not the problem. The problem is consequences.
Today, it is cheaper to staff with undocumented workers and hope they don't get caught. If ALL employers had to verify the ID of all of their employees and contractors or face serious fines and all contractors (including household help) were required to show a verifiable ID and anyone who fails to check or falsifies faced serious penalties, this problem would be hugely reduced overnight.
The real problem is that the big businesses (agriculture, meat packing, hospitality, commercial real-estate, etc..) want the cheap labor and won't let the problem be solved.
Federalism is officially a complete failure.
The day I am forced to get an unconstitutional "biometric ID card" in order not to have my job opportunities, directly subsidized by taxes, government-sponsored monopolies and other expropriated wealth, stolen by an illegal immigrant is the day that it's time to dissolve the federal government and revert it's duties back to states that have some semblance of fiscal responsibility and individual rights.
And I say this of course under the near-universal assumption (by now) that this, along with everything else the US government does, will do absolutely nothing to curb illegal immigration or salvage jobs or benefit Americans and instead will be used simply as another tool of inept government to punish the compliant and reward criminals and cheaters and traitor banks and businesses.
The US is no longer a functional government. It can't regulate borders. It dissolves them and signs them away in supranational treaties. It can't regulate trade or abusive businesses. It supports them and bails them out when they fail. It can't win wars. It can't even define "winning" in terms of the bullshit wars it now engages in. It can't regulate reproduction or resource consumption or immigration or anything that actually affects the long term well-being of it's citizens. All it can do at this point is make token bullshit infringements on the rights of anyone unlucky or stupid enough to get in it's way, accomplishing absolutely nothing save crippling debt increases in the process.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs
Well, that's scary. You could easily form a permanent underclass of never-employable again people with that plan.
There's no point to getting a card unless its more effective than a passport or drivers license or military ID, or my freaking passport would be good enough so we wouldn't need this new thing. It took months to get my passport, including all kinds of hoops to jump thru for notarization and some special kind of birth certificate and other foolishness involving the local postmaster. I assume this new thing will be worse, otherwise we wouldn't need it. Its a safe assumption that in general, any time the govt does anything, its to make it worse for the middle class, and this specific situation seems to fit the mold.
For a upper middle class employed dude like myself, a couple months time and a couple thousand bucks is annoying but no big deal, similar to replacing a leaking roof and fixing the damage. For dirt poor, unemployed, barely HS educated, how-mucha-month, joe six pack, he's screwed. What if J6P needs to hire a lawyer to fix some paperwork, or needs to pay up front to get docs from various agencies to prove his existence?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's funny how a lot of Americans are shouting "Dey took our jerbs!", but when you actually offer them the jobs that illegal immigrants are doing, i.e. scrubbing toilets for low wages, then suddenly they are too good for that kind of work.
Illegal immigrants do not take away high-pay jobs, and those actual high pay jobs are routinely shipped off to India and alike anyway. Those immigrants are greasing the wheels of the economy, doing jobs that nobody else wants to do.
I see it in my own country (Netherlands) where we have to ship in seasonal workers to harvest asparagus crops because they just can't get the local people to do the hard work.
It'll be interesting to see the effects of this plan.
Does Congress really live in a fantasy land where illegal immigrants are hired to positions where they supply SSNs, drivers licenses, etc? In my experience the vast majority of businesses employing illegal labor do so by paying them in cash. "Come work with us for a day putting up drywall, there's a few sawbucks in it for you." No amount of biometrics will stop this.
Illegal immigrants use stolen socials to get said jobs...yes it happens, and yes it is significant. Those socials are also used by criminals who are trying to avoid detection, used by people trying to steal benefits, used by people trying to get loans and defaulting on them, etc. It's a huge issue. SS theft is extremely bad - it hurts the person who had their information stolen (getting your SS changed is next to impossible). It hurts the businesses who got screwed out of loan money (which in turn raises the prices for the general public).
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Bypassing all the arguments for and against this plan, I notice an interesting detail in the article. It applies to employers and employees (form W2) only. It apparently does not apply to business owners or freelancers (form 1099). So all the independent people (lawnkeepers, housekeepers, pool cleaners, handymen, freelancing programmers, etc) won't be affected by this either way, at least at first. They'd have to expand it to apply to everyone asking for any kind of service (hospitals, unemployment, banks, groceries) to have it affect 100% of the population. So if you want to avoid this card as long as possible, just start your own service business, or convince your employer to convert you to a form 1099 contractor, instead of a form W2 employee. You'll have to work out the pay scale to afford your vacations, insurance, and other perks, but that's workable. Also, if a lot of people become their own bosses, they technically always will have a job (their own business), so the unemployment lines would diminish. Theoretically. ;-)
A driver's license is proof you had training in operating a potentially dangerous piece of machinery around others. Which is why they have ticky boxes for things like "chauffeur" and "commercial" on it. You know, because it's about driving. I agree, it shouldn't be used for anything other than employment as a driver, traffic violations, and insurance purposes! In fact, it's a perfect example of how the "oh, this card will only be used for X" is so easily corrupted!
Want to know what hysteria is? It's the "OMG TEH MEXICANS ARE STEALIN' MAH JOB!". Nevermind that these 'patriot' xenophobes tend to be the same group that practically worship symbols like the Statue of Liberty, but don't even bother to learn the inscription she carries (I'll give you a hint: "Give me your tired, your poor...") Instead of radio-collaring everyone, why don't we concentrate on fixing the broken immigration system that keeps legal applicants in limbo for years, pushing some to come here illegally instead. Oh wait, that's going to take a lot of effort and won't appease the xenophobes, so let's just put a shiny band-aid on it to get re-elected. (And with all the immigration hysteria, the fools won't even notice that we've chipped away a little more of their freedom!)
Between the libertarian right, the religious crazies who will conflate this with the "mark of the beast", and the lefties who don't trust law enforcement, this will never get through Congress. If it ever came to a vote, the uproar in the intertubes and talk radio would be deafening and the tea party loonies would all die of apoplexy.
No sig? Sigh...
The unfortunate side effect is that immigration is going to be even more of a nightmare for people who are legal to work in the US
You think that is the only unfortunate side effect, or even the most significant?
The potential for government abuse of this system is very high. The government can use it to track its own people without warrant, to further the current problem if lifetime punishments for every crime, and to silence anyone with an unfavorable opinion. Furthermore, this increases the risk of identity theft victimization, since swiping this card, or the information on it, is all such a thief will need to do (and don't think for a second that this unique identifier won't be used for credit applications, phone service, and everything else that the SSN is used for today (and more)).
This has "bad idea" written all over it, but is being sold as a solution to a problem that only exists because the government refuses to enforce its CURRENT POLICIES (and not due to their expense, but rather, due to the high demand for cheap foreign labor among donating businesses).
In the Netherlands, having your fingerprints taken when applying for a new passport became obligatory last year. The government pretended that this was necessary in order to fight terrorism, although the measure is way more severre than what the European Union requires governments to do. There were and still are some civil rights organizations protesting against this security craze.
A very unfortunate side effect of this became visible at the latest elections. People were required to bring a passport along with their voter's registration card. 200,000 voters, a significant percentage of the country's registered voters, didnot have such an ID, for various reasons ( poverty, ignorance, laxism, protest ). Thus, they were excluded from the most fundamental mechanism underlying a democracy: voting.
Americans, beware !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
There is one major difference between a license to drive and a license to work. If I wanted to, I can drop off the grid. I can just not renew my license, get a bicycle, stop using credit cards, do odd jobs for cash or barter, pay cash for everything, and completely disappear. There is nothing illegal about this (other than tax evasion, if you are earning more than $8000 per year, but I'm sure there are legal ways to deal with paying taxes while not having an official address), as there is nothing mandating that I have a driver's license, nor anything forcing me to use credit/debit cards.
If, however, a license to work is created, then the step "do odd jobs for cash or barter" becomes illegal if I don't have this license to work. Now, there is no option for me to drop off the grid. I have no choice.
I know at this point it's a small difference (almost to the point of not existing), and that 99.99% of society likely has some form of ID that allows the government to track them, but the point is that, to date, all forms of ID are effectively voluntary. Take away my ability to get paid to work, a basic requirement for survival, and we've got a serious problem. It's the principle of the thing—Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. This inability to work stifles my ability to pursue happiness (a starving man cannot be happy - see Maslow's hierarchy of needs), and in the long run, through starvation, would remove my right to Life itself. Essentially, the government is trying to get me to give up part of my right to Life and my right to pursue happiness in exchange for eliminating the illegal immigrant problem. Screw that. I'd rather let the whole world in than give up the last vestiges of my freedom to choose whether or not I wish to have "papers" to identify myself.
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
anyone who has an opinion about this can contact Senator Schumer and Senator Graham
I lived in USA for 6 years and the best thing there, in terms of citizen-government interaction, was that there was no mandatory ID cards.
Sure, an ID card is not that big of a deal at first. It's not much unlike a DL (which almost everyone carries around all the time anyway), and it's not like the police can't track you down all the time.
But this is what will happen:
Here in Serbia, quite literally, I can't even take a walk in the park anymore without a cop stopping me and asking for ID...
For the third time in this thread I would point out that many states do, in fact, require you to carry ID's at all time, and the Supreme Court has upheld that. So just try to tell a cop that you don't need to show him your papers sometime. And enjoy your night in jail.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Some employers may stop hiring illlegals, others will take the risk and continue hiring them. The glut of unemployed illegals will drive their wages down and increase the margins realized the employer hiring them.
This is what the government wants. An employer caught hiring illegals will be fined and have assets confiscated. It will be a profit center for government, prosecuting and deporting illegals is not.
FUCK THAT!
(seriously...in addition to the obvious reasons why this is such an awful idea, there is going to be a very large population of people who will see this as "the mark of the beast.")
because employers do not need to comply with costly labor laws.
New Economic Perspectives
Back in the USSA!
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
However, consider that revoking a card would be necessary but you can't necessarily revoke the information on the card, or if you do, you cause someone a great deal of grief. There are reasons why biometric data is considered to be the weakest form of strong security.
There is a great deal of potential for abuse here, just with the no-fly lists, etc, but this is worse because I can still drive my car across the country (I might not be able to if I didn't have income though). There is no life in prison for every crime, and our courts won't let that happen as long as they are open for business. However, I am concerned that someone might pull strings to get cards revoked in order to mess with political opponents (I seriously doubt Sen. Kennedy's inclusion on the No-Fly list was entirely accidental).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
As Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada made clear, simply telling the officer your name is not sufficient. No photo id? Do not pass Go, go directly to jail.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually most id laws only require you to identify yourself verbally, and only your name. They do not require you to present physical ID. This has been upheld by the Supreme Court (Hibel v Nevada). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_Identify_statutes
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
What is wrong with using a Passport? Passports will contain the same biometric information as these ID cards.
As someone who just finished dealing with the US govt getting a greencard for my wife (no, she was not a mail order bride, you twits - we met while I was living abroad), I am in full support of enforcing our immigration laws. Fuck illegal immigrants. My wife and I jumped through all the fucking hoops proving she was who she was...we were a legit marriage...she was not a terrorist...that I could "support her" if she could not work...all that shit. I get so frustrated when I see these illegal jackasses - and dont whine this shit about "noone is 'illegal'" - 'cause they are breaking the fucking law and need to be punished.
I would love to see E-Verify be mandatory. $5-k fines per worker per day for NOT using it. I would like to see E-verify have a running database that flags SSN repeat hits cross-referenced against the full names and date of birth along with the geographic locations from the hit. I would also like to see a "feature" where you could lock your SSN down - i.e. you go to a federal facility and request that your SSN be locked to your current job, so some jackass jacks your SSN to clear E-Verify they say, "No - says you have your SSN on file here working at XYZ INC...not Javier's Drywall. Is this you, or do you need to get into the deportation catapult?" Would have to be easy to adjust this setting, but I think it would rock.
While biometrics are awesome, I know some people are scared of big sister. I think the cross-reference deal would take care of it for the most part.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
I would be much more, okay, slightly less paranoid about things like this with one change. Any legislation like this applies to the members of government FIRST. You want a single biometric ID for all workers, after you, Senator. Don't think we need warrants for wiretaps, fine, we will just install this nice little device on all your phones, and the transcripts can go straight to wikileaks. Have a problem with "government run health care"? Fine, we will just take away your health plan (it's government run after all). Good luck finding insurance now, Mr. Old White guy with a bad heart.
--You're BOTH right. It's a floor wax AND a desert topping!
See for example Marshall Brain's writings:
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A list of current robotics videos I put together, with robots doing everything from milk cows, prune grape vines, throw and catch cell phones, put laundry in washing machines, invent and test new theories in yeast genetics, and do autopsies (the last one isn't a video, thankfully):
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html
So, ID cards and worries about illegal immigrants are all a distraction from rethinking the economy along the lines of having some mix of a basic income, local subsistence production from 3D printing and organic gardening, a gift economy like GNU/Linux, better resource-based planning, making work into play, a spread of local currencies and LETS systems, and lots of other possibilities I helped organize here for moving beyond a jobless recovery:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
If you want to worry, worry about how to build an economy where we get past the irony of using abundant military robots to enforce a scarcity-based economic system designed around getting humans to work like robots. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.