Worker ID card proposed for everybody-part of a comprehensive immigration bill

[The Straight Story]

Worker ID card proposed for everybody

There's an old idea floating around Capitol Hill these days for a national ID card for all U.S. workers, a biometric identity card to prevent illegal workers from being hired.

It's part of a comprehensive immigration bill that is being written by members of Congress. And it's likely to create an enormous amount of controversy and probably not get very far. Still, it's an idea that is coming of age as the technology to create a biometric card gets better, more secure and less intrusive on an individual's privacy rights.

The card would include embedded information such as fingerprints, or it could scan the veins on top of the hand, reports The Wall Street Journal.

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.

http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/worker-id-card-proposed-everybody/2010-03-10

[Earth_First]

1. My papers are right here officer...

[cliffordu]

5. My take exactly.

[The Northerner]

16. +1000

[HillbillyBob]

2. Every time this insane idea is floated

I keep thinking of Der Vaterland SS 'your papers please' ...an order phrased as a request is still an order.

[SoCalDem]

10. That's what the righties are hoping people think of

There will NEVER be a universal health care plan without an ID program.

And people already have a PILE of IDs they carry around every day, anyway.

They carry a GPS with them if they have a modern cellphone.laptop(sometimes)

All their phone calls & IMs can be (and are) retrieved and splashed on TV & newspapers (if they are juicy and you are a public person)

There is NO anonymity..hasn't been for AGES now..

an ID is your "ticket-to-ride"..

that's all it is..

Want to use the gym?..show your ID
want to get credit for college classes..show that ID, buster
want that discount at the JiffyLube? show the ID
want to get that in-store discount at Smart & Final? whip out that ID card

want to access your health care with a $20 co-pay? show that card

[Gormy Cuss]

12. Many of those things on your list are OPTIONAL

and there is a distinct difference between an ID tied to an account for a specific purpose and a national ID.

Don't go to a gym, or Jiffy Lube, or Smart & Final -- there are other ways to accomplish all those tasks without showing an ID or signing up for that data miner/marketer's dream, an affinity card.

GPS signals can be turned off in most appliances for all but emergency services use, and even the latter can be thwarted if one cares to do so.

Not everyone uses IMs and identity on phone calls can be masked with throwaway phone calls.

I could go on, but not everyone is ready to concede that just because technology is ahead of privacy law that we should shrug our shoulders and say "Oh well."

You may carry around a pile of IDs everyday, but many of us don't. I have exactly three, and two of those are for access to medical benefits.

[SoCalDem]

14. Well, if there is ever a national ID care to access medical care,

you can choose not to participate, I guess..

I'll be long-dead before we ever join the rest of the civilized world, so I'm not worried..

IDs don't scare me:)..but then I grew up on military bases where we had to have ours on us at all times")

[Go2Peace]

19. The answer is pretty simple. Make strong privacy legislation with teeth

**then** people will be less concened about a National ID card.

The reason there is resistance is simple and three words "Social Security Card".

The SS card was never intended to be something that could be use to gather all kinds of data and used in nefarious ways to deny people access to things like unsurance or credit. There even were laws against that use. But look what happened?

Make it illegal to combine data from uses of the National ID card, and make that law very difficult to break. Maybe even a constitutional amendment, and people will be more likely to go along.

[rfranklin]

3. That was a favorite intimidation technique in Nazi Germany...

Where are your papers?

[pipoman]

4. Libs will oppose based on privacy concerns

cons will oppose because it is 'the mark of the beast'..

[havocmom]

7. And some cleaver criminals (probably richer ones, as resources will be needed)

will make a fortune selling counterfeit, or even real, IDs to workers and employers who want cheap worker they have more control over.

[Gormy Cuss]

13. Hit the nail on the head.

The 1986 reform, which is the law that dictates that we all prove that we have a right to work in this country each time we're hired, was supposed to shut down illegal immigrant hiring. We all know how well that worked. It did create a cottage industry in fake IDs.

[katmondoo]

6. Congress sure likes Fascism

Keep oppressing the poor and middle class, the way to go these days

[exboyfil]

8. I don't like it

but what are we going to do? I would like alternatives. Should we be obligated to bring Mexico and the other Central/South American countries to our standard of living? Jobs are an issue in this country, and how can we justify employing significant numbers of undocumented workers in meat processing, janitorial, domestic, gardening, and construction industries etc? It was not very long ago that these were all viewed as good lower middle class jobs (or middle class supplemental jobs for workers whose spouses had solid middle class jobs). The conservatives want to put a fence on the border. The liberals want to grant citizenship for those currently working in this country. After they are granted citizenship will that change the economics of exploitation related to these workers. Now that they are on the books - won't they bid up their salary and just allow another wave to undercut them for their jobs etc starting the cycle over once again.

[havocmom]

11. What to do? Deploy law enforcement to bust chops of employers who hire illegal workers

Make it serious. Stop chasing bands of exploited workers, wasting $ on all the red tape to send them back to their nations of origin, USE THE RESOURCES AT THE IMMEDIATE ROOT: employers who are so greedy they will break the law and hire people they can abuse/exploit with ease.

While law enforcement/courts do that, the rest of us can work on global economic justice. And, yeah that DOES mean we have to lower our standards of lifestyle in the US, but the multi-national corporations are already doing that to us. We might want to join with workers globally and try to level playing fields instead of letting corporations increase the divide between most of humanity and the oligarchy that seems intent on a return to the feudal system world-wide.

[exboyfil]

15. Just did that in Iowa

The owner of the meat processing plant is going to prison. The community around the plant was devistated though. I think a vast majority of undocumented workers are hired by individuals or small companies that are extremely hard to track/control - meat packing is an exception. I think the lack of a national ID card allows employers a ready out on prosecution though. I am all for throwing those who hire illegals into prison - most conservatives I know would agree. Without a "Papers please" situation it becomes very difficult.

[havocmom]

9. Paging (DEM) Governor Schweitzer of Montana....

http://www.google.com/search?q=governor+Schweitzer+fights+Real+ID&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

I luvs my guv

[Odin2005]

17. Ick, more Fascism.

[Shandris]

18. I'm somewhat ambivalent on the topic, personally.

While we as a whole are practically ingrained to immediately react to the German/fascist feelings that these proposals suggest, the poster who mentioned that it is a required first step towards Universal Health Care likewise made a very solid point. Technology seems as if it will always and ever be ahead of what remains of the Privacy Curve, and as a whole, we as a nation have decided that this is how we like things to be. We don't care if marketers get our preferences (They send us coupons!), we don't care about protecting ourselves online (Look, if I can click on the moving target, I get into a sweepstakes!), we don't care if entire branches of the government can access everything we say, write, or speak (Look, this will keep us safer from terrorists!). I guess I just think some wars aren't worth fighting when the outcome is obvious.

To wit, I suppose if I were called upon immediately to make a thought on the topic, I would say that if it can help deal with illegal immigration and the problems it can cause, AND is (obviously) a crucial step in the delivery of Universal Health Care for all citizens, AND can remove the need for stacks upon stacks of identification (and the bureaucracies that are necessary to support them), then perhaps we should focus our efforts not on preventing the passage of them, but instead on the important details OF them. Things like making certain there are sufficient methods to replace one should it become necessary, that the internal redundancies prevent simple-operation data-keying mistakes (Someone had their SS# miskeyed in as mine, now I'm apparently a wealthy man with an income of 440,000/yr. Try telling the IRS you live on SS when 'the computer' says otherwise.), and that access is on a very security-conscious hierarchy.

It is easy to feel the 'ghosts', as they were, of Nazi Germany and fascism. But many things were done under those governments that are done under all governments. It took a certain amount of enabling to bring that particular beast to light, and our best efforts would be spent in preventing said enabling. Germany used an Air Force to great effect in the earliest days of WWII. Should we dismantle ours entirely simply because the German one bombed so many cities?

[surrealAmerican]

20. This presupposes that employers accidentally hire ...

... illegal immigrants, and thus it will not solve the problem.

Most employers who do hire illegal immigrants know full well that's what they're doing.

[Retrograde]

21. new employees now are required to provide documentation showing a legal right to work

And employers are required to keep copies of those on file. This has been federal law since the 1990s, and yet some employers still knowingly hire illegal workers Having a new set of papers to ignore isn't going to change much.

[Igel]

22. Since before that.

And some employers do knowingly hire illegal workers--but their butts are well papered over with the photocopies of employee documentation.

Some don't know. To this day I don't know if Raul was here legally. He had the right documentation, claimed to have received amnesty in the '80s and to be here legally. Was he? I had his ID, but if I had checked up on him because of his skin color or first language but didn't check up on everybody else, well, that would be discriminatory.

Some suspect, but don't know. I mean, I did the I-9 forms for a while and had four quite different looking SS cards. I thought Maria was here illegally. When she came in one day and had me replace the old copies of her ID with new copies saying that she was "Gertrude Wilkinson", aged 58 and born in Topeka, KS (or some such nonsense when the employee was perhaps 21 and didn't know a word of English) it pretty much cinched it for me.