**Izzy, ** I seem to recall that you live in the Chicago area; is that true? Well, so do I. And my entire professional history has been in Chicago, including my adventures with Immigration Court.
Yes, the population that made it through Immigration Court is not representative of the illegally present community at large. And yes, many employers never request the documentation required on the I-9 form which all employees are supposed to complete upon starting a new job…in spite of the potential penalties for failure to document employees’ legal status (depending on severity, up to thousands of dollars per offense). Info on the I-9 requirements and a printable form:
http://www.immigration.gov/graphics/formsfee/forms/i-9.htm
And many more employers accept documents that they either know or suspect to be false; to do otherwise may constitute and unfair immigration-related employment practice. See the FAQ at link:
http://www.immigration.gov/graphics/howdoi/EEV.htm
“What happens if I properly complete a Form I-9 and the BICE discovers that my employee is not actually authorized to work?
You cannot be charged with a verification violation; however, you cannot knowingly continue to employ this individual. You will have a good faith defense against the imposition of employer sanctions penalties for knowingly hiring an unauthorized alien unless the government can prove you had actual knowledge of the unauthorized status of the employee.
What is my responsibility concerning the authenticity of document(s) presented to me?
You must examine the document(s) and, if they reasonably appear on their face to be genuine and to relate to the person presenting them, you must accept them. To do otherwise could be an unfair immigration-related employment practice. If a document does not reasonably appear on its face to be genuine and to relate to the person presenting it, you must not accept it.”
Because of hugely varying standards for commonly accepted identity documents, it’s not difficult to come up with believable fakes; from an American Immigration Lawyers’ Association backgrounder, which you can find at:
http://www.aila.org/fileViewer.aspx?docID=9857
“According to the Department of Health and Human Services, there are 14,000 different versions of birth certificates in circulation.”
Combine a fake birth certificate (or one belonging to someone else, even a dead person) with a Social Security number (that of a dead person, or of a friend, or a stolen one) and/or photo ID, and all sorts of things are possible: jobs, utilities, leases, etc., none of which are necessarily traceable back to the actual individual’s identity. My co-worker who used to work for Legal Assistance with migrant workers spent a good deal of her time helping people combine Social Security records for several identities which actually belonged to one individual into a single Social Security record after they legalized (this was years ago, so legalization was subject to amnesty, or sometimes to legalization through a close family member with legal status once their place in the queue is reached). Sometimes she would have to sort out the simultaneous full-time earnings of several people who were “sharing” a SS#. It was a bureaucratic nightmare, she says.
In the interim, people find all sorts of creative ways to carry on their daily business. Desperate people will do desperate things, and buying a fake identity document is down pretty low on the scale of desperate things to do.
Wouldn’t you want to remove things which are not national security-related in the vast majority of cases, like obtaining driver’s licenses and bank accounts, from the motivations to commit fraud? I do.