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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.
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?
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.
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
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!)
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).
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...
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.
Back in the USSA!
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.
So, because you had to go through absolutely fucking ridiculous lengths to live a normal life with your wife you think everybody should have to go through the same sort of gauntlet? Its like you are a frat boy who got hazed and as result thinks that anyone else who didn't go through the torture he did is not worthy.
Personally, I don't give a shit if someone is a 'citizen' or not - as long they pay their taxes there shouldn't be any other requirements. It's bad enough that so many employers accuse you of being a drug abuser just because you want to work for them, having to please one more massive beauracracy just for the privilege of earning a living is beyond the pale.
And yes, I married a girl from another country too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Your response is one great big woooooosh!
Frat and legal residence is hardly apples/apples
Wooooosh #1: The point is not whether a frat is legal residence or not (what a totally random disassociation to pick) it is the fact that you had to suffer and now you want everyone else to suffer too - including native born citizens who have to put up with this verification system. And you seem to be the type to think that suffering is justified because "that's the law" rather than consider that the law is wrong.
I think by 'citizen' you mean 'legal resident and legally eligible for employment'
Wooooosh #2: Yeah, that's exactly what I meant, where "legal" is defined as paying their taxes, full stop. You clearly think that all the additional laws are undeserving of criticism.
If you don't like that Company XYZ requires drug screens or background checks - then take your application elsewhere.
Wooooosh #3: Again with "the rules are OK because they are the rules" and undeserving of criticism. I threw that drug-test bit out there as bait to see if you were of a fascist bent, you certainly seem to be. You might as well argue that requiring that all applicants pass an STD test. After all, its important to the safety and integrity of the workplace that no one need fear catching cooties from their fellow employees.
Here's something you will be unable to rationally justify - companies like blockbuster requires their employees pass a drug test. In what way does smoking a joint at home on the weekends risk the integrity/safety of their workplace?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.