Wampum

In his Oval Office speech to the nation about immigration, President Bush proposed to make employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants once, but not until, legal immigrants are issued tamper proof identity cards:

Third, we need to hold employers to account for the workers they hire. It is against the law to hire someone who is in this country illegally.

Yet businesses often cannot verify the legal status of their employees because of the widespread problem of document fraud. Therefore, comprehensive immigration reform must include a better system for verifying documents and work eligibility. A key part of that system should be a new identification card for every legal foreign worker. This card should use biometric technology, such as digital fingerprints, to make it tamper-proof. A tamper-proof card would help us enforce the law, and leave employers with no excuse for violating it. And by making it harder for illegal immigrants to find work in our country, we would discourage people from crossing the border illegally in the first place.

It is not clear to me how that will work. Even if every legal immigrant is issued an identity card that can not be forged, that does not seem to be sufficient to allow employers to verify the status of job seekers.

Assume an employer has three applicants for a job. One applicant is a legal immigrant with a tamper-proof identity card. The second is an illegal immigrant. The third is an American citizen by virtue of birth. The employer can safely hire the first applicant as the identity card protects the employer from legal sanction. Neither the illegal immigrant nor the citizen can produce such a card. How is the employer to distinguish between the two?

If I were called upon to prove my United States citizenship, I would have two ways to do so. First, I could produce a passport. Many Americans, however, do not have passports as they have had no opportunity to travel abroad. To require every American to have a passport is to require a national identity card, a proposal which would draw vociferous objections from both left and right. Unless the political landscape changes substantially, I do not think requiring a national identify card for every American is practical. Americans have a deep distrust of officials having the right to demand to see one's "papers."

My second method of proving my citizenship is to produce a birth certificate showing that I was born in North Carolina. As a practical matter, that is how an employer will distinguish between an illegal alien and a citizen of the United States. Or will the employer be able to do so? It seems that in addition to a tamper-proof identity card, a tamper proof birth certificate will also be necessary. There are currently nearly 300 million Americans without tamper-proof birth certificates.

Mr. Bush describes the problem as being that "businesses often cannot verify the legal status of their employees because of the widespread problem of document fraud." The production of tampe- proof identity cards will just shift that problem from the forging of Social Security cards to forging of birth certificates. That does mean that tamper-proof identity cards for legal immigrants is a bad idea. It just means that it will not solve all of the problem.