Senator’s Schumer and Graham’s immigration bill includes the creation of a biometric social security card. Its aim is to eliminate illegal immigration while tracking ordinary, innocent citizens.
The “enhanced Social Security card” is being touted as a way to curb illegal immigration by giving employers the power to quickly and accurately determine who is eligible to work.
While there is nothing wrong in reducing the current 26 different forms of identification that proves a person is authorized to work, creating a biometric social security card is not the answer.
The sheer scale of the project is a potential problem, in terms of time, money and technology. The premise of using a biometric employment card (which would most likely contain fingerprint data) to stop illegal immigrants from working requires that all 150 million–plus American workers, not just immigrants, have one. Michael Cherry, president of identification-technology company Cherry Biometrics, says the accuracy of such large-scale biometric measuring hasn’t been proved. “What study have we done?” he says. “We just have a few assumptions.”
Schumer estimates that employers would have to pay up to $800 for card-reading machines, and many point out that compliance could prove burdensome for many small-to-medium-size businesses. In a similar program run by the Department of Homeland Security, in which 1.4 million transportation workers have been issued biometric credentials, applicants each pay $132.50 to help cover the costs of the initiative, which so far run in the hundreds of millions. “This is sort of like the worst combination of the DMV and the TSA,” says Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the ACLU, an organization that has traditionally opposed all forms of national ID. “It’s going to be enormously costly no matter what.”
Not only is scaling this to fit the needs of the entire country astronomically high, placing the burden on job applicants is not fair either. If you force applicants to pay such huge sums to cover the costs, you’ll bankrupt people before they ever find work.
Lynden Melmed, former chief counsel for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, says the pace of expanding the program is crucial. He believes that issuing the cards on a rolling basis and viewing them as “the next version of the driver’s license” makes the idea of a nationally issued biometric ID seem much less daunting. “I think that there is a risk in overreaching too quickly,” he says.
Tying your social security card, identification, and driver’s license into a single card, with all the information in one database, but shared with others, is idiotic on an unprecedented scale. It doesn’t matter if it’s rolled out over time or all at once. Privacy, such as this, should never be shared across three different government entities such as these.
Expecting Joe Citizen to know and understand how to read fingerprints is also a stupid idea. If the system in place is done automatically, then you are relying on the fact that the data is 100% correct, was never inputted incorrectly, and has never been tampered with.
In testimony given at a Senate immigration hearing in July 2009, Illinois Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, who has led the drive for immigration reform in the House, pointed out that an error rate of just 1% would mean that more than 1.5 million people — roughly the population of Philadelphia — would be wrongly deemed ineligible for work.
Imagine that, one day, due to an error rate of 1%, 1.5 million people no longer have work eligibility. If the error rate can never be zero, your system is no better than what we have now.
The bill also does not indicate whether or not you can be removed from this “no-job” list.
Many skeptics also worry about false positives that come not from the computer but from counterfeits or employers looking to bypass the system. “It’s naive to think that this document won’t be faked,” Calabrese says. “Folks are already paying $10,000 to sneak into the country. What’s a couple thousand more?” In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Schumer and Graham said the card would be “fraud-proof” and that employers would face “stiff fines” and possibly imprisonment if they tried to get around using it. But Cherry half-jokes that someone could falsify such an ID in 15 minutes, and Khosla says that while current technology makes fingerprints the most feasible biometric marker to use, they’re also one of the easiest to steal.
The senators said the biometric information would only be stored on the card. This still doesn’t answer the problem of card cloning. Also, if the information is only on the card, then how do you verify it? How do you know that the information is correct? The story just doesn’t add up.
Although the card is being presented as existing solely for determining employment eligibility, “it will be almost impossible to say that this wealth of information is there, but you can only use it for this purpose,” Coney says. “Privacy is pretty much hinged on the notion that if you collect data for one purpose, you can’t use it for another.” Calabrese expresses worries that this ID will become a “central identity document” that one will need in order to travel, vote or perhaps own a gun, which Melmed calls “mission creep.”
And he has good reason to worry. Social security cards were designed solely for dealing with the Social Security Administration and receiving checks. Driver’s licenses were solely a slip of paper entitling you the ability to drive a motor vehicle. Both are now considered forms of ID.
While the privacy implications are obvious, mistrust of the government, costs, liability, and technological limitations must be addressed. The details are scant and, without them, no one is going to jump on board a half thought out plan until all the details are laid out on the table.
