Loss of Privacy

Earlier this week, Presidental hopeful, Mitt Romney, spoke at a town hall meeting in Iowa that he supports an expansion of the controversial E-Verify program for employment. Currently, the program checks the legal status of new employees, but Romney would push it further.

Mitt Romney backed a national ID system and government pre-approval of all new hires in the country. It’s a stunning amount of power he wants the federal government to have.

You’ve got to crack down on employers that hire people that are illegal, and that means you have to have a system that identifies who’s here legally, with a biometric card that has: this is the person, they’re allowed to work here. You say to an employer, you look at that card, you swipe it in your computer, you type in the number, it instantly tells you whether they’re legal or not.

The E-Verify system is a biometric identification system that is a direct response from Congress as a part of immigration reform. Despite the fact that the government continually tells us that an E-Verify or national ID system would solve our illegal immigration problem, it will never work.

A mandatory national EEV system would have substantial costs yet still fail to prevent illegal immigration. It would deny a sizable percentage of law-abiding American citizens the ability to work legally. Deemed ineligible by a database, millions each year would go pleading to the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration for the right to work. By increasing the value of committing identity fraud, EEV would cause that crime’s rates to rise.

Creating an accurate EEV system would require a national identification (ID) system, costing about $20 billion to create and hundreds of millions more per year to operate. Even if it were free, the country should reject a national ID system. It would cause law-abiding American citizens to lose more of their privacy as government records about them grew and were converted to untold new purposes. “Mission creep” all but guarantees that the federal government would use an EEV system to extend federal regulatory control over Americans’ lives even further.

The E-Verify system is inaccurate fifty-percent [pdf] of the time costing employees thousands of dollars in rectifying the situation. If implemented nationwide, it would cost small business owners billions in additional taxes.

Our immigration system is broken, but this is not the way to fix it. Immigrants, illegal or legal, play an extremely important part in American society. Removing them with a system that only works half the time not only hurts the immigrants and citizens caught up in the system, but every American who relies on the goods and services that they provide.

The Obama administration has been extremely tough on rounding up illegal immigrants and deporting them. So tough that he’s deported more than any other administration in history. So what’s the problem you ask? Well, no one wants the jobs because they either don’t pay enough, are too hard, or both.

Read the rest of my article at The Daily Censored.

From C-Span:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing focusing on U.S. immigration policy.

Even though Jose wasn’t born in America, he’s just as American as I am. It’s time we started taking immigration seriously and helping these folks out. You can help by writing to Congress and letting them know you support the DREAM Act.

When E-Verify was first introduced, I said that it would not help in discovering illegal immigrants. Turns out I’m right again and the government didn’t think their plan through. The government is now thinking of using the credit agency Equifax to help shore up the E-Verify program in an attempt to salvage what’s left of the program.

The plan by the Department of Homeland Security, which is still preliminary and would probably require congressional approval, could have far-reaching consequences. The government already allows employers to check the legal status of employees using a system known as E-Verify, but hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants beat the system by using stolen Social Security numbers.

Well, who would have thought of that? Oh right. That was me.

If workers had to use the verification systems in place to apply for a mortgage or a bank account, they would not only have to present a Social Security number to an employer, but also answer questions about their personal history and financial background to establish their identity.

You can’t ask about personal history or financial backgrounds during the job application and interviewing process. It violates federal law.

On Monday, the government announced that it would begin allowing individuals in the District, Virginia and four other states to voluntarily use a system provided by Equifax to verify their identity. Once they did that, they could access a federal database to verify their authorization to work. The move will help the small number of legally authorized immigrants and U.S. citizens who encounter problems each year when an employer runs their Social Security numbers through the E-Verify system.

The voluntary program will be piloted in the District, Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Mississippi. It will be expanded nationwide in the coming months.

These problems, according to the government are minor issues such as spelling mistakes.

Since House republicans want the E-Verify system to be mandatory instead of voluntary, it’s probably a good idea for the government to fix the problems of a nearly useless system before instituting it as a mandate. By using Equifax, the government is hoping to circumvent the privacy protections upon employment, mainly those that use financial figures, credit scores, and personal details, that are otherwise illegal to ask when applying for a job.