IAAL and have a client that is a large local wholesale plant nursery that employs a number of Mexicans. My client has been scrupulous about employee recordkeeping (having passed an IRS and INS audit) and has been asking our congressmen and senators for such a computerized system for a long time.
Why? And I ask that as a liberal Democrat who fucking hates the Bush administration.
Oh, knee-jerk partisanship, I fully admit it. Just a throw-away statement, not to be taken too seriously.
It wouldn’t matter if someone logged in illegally. All you get back from entering ssn, name, and date of birth is a yes or a no. You’d need to do a full identity theft to be able to fool the system. Even then, you’d have to get the sex right, and we the legal system might look askance at an employer with a bunch of Latinos with supposed names of Hilda Johannsen and Murray Schwartz.
As to why it hasn’t been done - might be a combination of overactive privacy and that businesses don’t really want to crack down on illegal immigration.
I think they are doing just that. From Loopydude’s link
What I don’t get is why did they write to them 13 times ???
1,000 employees with dubious SSNs? After the first time, they should have paid them a visit.
Hmmm…
How would the system tell if several people were sharing a number? If the guy had like twelve jobs in five states, I can see where that might raise some flags, but if things get kept to a more probable level I could see thing being a problem.
Not really. This only applies to people who have gone through the legal process of gaining permanent residence. It does not apply to the following people who are legally entitled to work here:
a) non-immigrant workers (such as myself) who are here on a temporary work visa
b) US citizens
The visa probably isn’t forged all that often in the context of illegal immigration because the requirement for pretending to be a US citizen is so much lower (just fake an SSN). So you’d probably need an ID system for everyone legally in the country for this idea to be effective. I have no real issues with this myself, but I’d imagine it would be a tough sell in the US.
They would have to have all the other data that goes with the number: name, address, date of birth, etc. If you wanted to make it even more difficult to share a number, require workers to supply the amount of their last tax refund/payment. It reveals nothing about their finances, but it changes every year. Fraudulent workers would be hard pressed to stay current. Yes, solving this problem will impose some additional hassle on the law abiding citizens. So what else is new? The problem will only get bigger if we demand a solution that puts all the burden on “somebody else”.
You might be interested in this article in today’s NY Times. A few quotes:
Naturalized citizens are not immigrants with a work permit.
We manage to print money with a lot of anti-counterfeiting features. Once the printing process is established the product rolls off the presses with great dispatch and at low cost.
No, but we are immigrants. I have a trace of an accent at times and a birth certificate which has “England” on it. If you were talking to me on the street or interviewing me for a job and my accent was showing, you would have no way of knowing if I were an illegal immigrant, someone here on a work visa, a resident alien, aka legal immigrant, or a naturalized US citizen. If you were talking to my brothers, you’d have no way of knowing which is a former resident alien who’s now a naturalized citizen and which one is a native-born US citizen. As I understand the current law, we’d all be fine producing identical information to demonstrate our right to work in the US.
I like the idea of a system which would flag possibly suspicous-looking Social Security numbers. While I realize they’re not supposed to be used as IDs, in practicet they do seem to be a widely accepted form of identification and, as a programmer, it makes to build on something already in place, effective, and accepted rather than building something from scratch.
Here’s one minor fact to contribute to this discussion. When I first applied for a Social Security Card at age 16, the woman handling the application said she’d have to check to make sure I was eligible to work in this country! :eek: Considering I was already working for the town library and expecting to spend the rest of my life living and working in the US, it was a rather unpleasant shock!
Ya know, everybody’s ancestors were immigrants at some point and every nation is made up of immigrants. Things were different 100, 1000 and 10,000 years ago and we can’t keep bringing that up when talking about today.
Yes, but it wasn’t my ancestors who immigrated to the US, it was me! I thought I’d made that clear. Maybe I’ve been whooshed?
There are no current regulatory prohibitions against using the SSN as a personal identification number.
In that case, let’s go for it.
I must have been whooshed!
Siege,
The way I understand it, it’s the social security account card itself that’s not supposed to be used as an identification card.
For starters, the overwhelming majority of migrant workers work in fields that pay cash (construction, small restaurants, domestic) and don’t need a social security card. They might have busted 1,100 illegals in Houston this week, but those numbers are the tip of the iceberg.
Some oft maligned, unciteable, anecdotal evidence. The company I work for employs illegal (Mexican) aliens. While sitting in on a (NY) State payroll audit last year, through his winks and nods, I learned a few things from our auditor.
State auditors usually know & can weed out who’s using unauthentic SSNs from the outset. The first 3 digits of a SSN are coded by region and the year the # was issued. For example: both my boss and I were born in the late 1960s in NYC and both our SSNs begin with 059. Even though reporting between state agencies and the federal gov’t is minimal, neither cares when a bogus SSN is used because the (never to be claimed) contributions into the social security, workmen’s comp and disabilty contribute in keeping those systems solvent.
They do that for natural-born citizens too when you start to work, even if you have a birth certificate, SSN card, and all that jazz. When I got my first job I had to wait a few days so they could check that my birth certificate was legit. It’s just standard bureaucracy.
I’d love to see the “blame” of illegal immigration put on the employers, seeing as how it’s corporate greed that’s gotten us into this “mess.” I’m in favor of totally open immigration anyway, and a borderless society, but if we’re going to enforce these “laws” then we should get to the root of the problem, not just attack people who came to America for a better life like, well, all of our ancestors (not counting Natives, slaves, prisoners, etc). However, I really don’t see Americans willing to pay full price for the products we buy and the services we use. It’s much more American to pay $1 for a crappy hamburger and then cuss out the Mexican busboy even though his existence is what brings you such savings.
On preview: JohnBckWLD is also right in that the government is complicit in illegal immigration. Despite all that neocon cloth about how illegal immigrants suck resources away from America, these people actually give back much more. When an employer decides to pay a worker $3 an hour even though his position should pay $7.50 an hour, that worker is giving America $3.50 an hour. Even aside from the unclaimed benefits issue, immigrants keep our prices down and help the rich get richer. I really do think blaming immigrants for being here is a lot like blaming slaves for being here. Our fatcattery would not be possible without them.
In the interest of accuracy, the majority of neo-conservative commentators I’ve read don’t demagogue the immigration issue. Paleo-con; yeah. Neo-con; not from anything I’ve seen.
Hence my suggestion, posed as a question. There’s obviosly sufficient recognition of a problem, but little politcal will to do anything about it that’s constructive. The American voter really needs to come to terms with how me we rely upon cheap labor within our borders to offset skyrocketing trade deficits, etc. They’ve gotta learn to love the “wetback” rather than view him as a parasitic outlaw.
The only way I can see to universally motivate 'merkuns is to hit 'em where they live: The wallet. Again, supply-side enforcement seems doomed to failure. The average consumer demands illegals without knowing it. The ones who are fully aware of the need are the ones who depend on the illegal aliens to stay in business. Their numbers are many, but not nearly as large as the illegals they hire. So focus on them, killing many birds with the smallest number of stones. Demand, by necessity, dries up. Prices for, say, things like California produce skyrocket, and consumers wail and gnash teeth and demand change. They also go apeshit over, say, the loss of family farmers and the “American Way of Life” all that symbolizes. Etc. They’ll come around when it hurts.