Tag: illegal immigration

Schumer and Graham on Immigration Reform: Why Not Do it Without the Biometric National ID?

By
Jim Harper

There is much to commend in the op-ed on immigration reform that Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) published in this morning’s Washington Post. Unfortunately, they lead with their worst idea: a biometric national ID card, mandatory for all American workers.

Here’s the good: “Americans overwhelmingly oppose illegal immigration and support legal immigration,” they say. “Throughout our history, immigrants have contributed to making this country more vibrant and economically dynamic.”

Their plan includes problem-solving proposals: “creating a process for admitting temporary workers” and “implementing a tough but fair path to legalization.” The latter would reduce the population of illegal aliens in the U.S.—good—and the former would reduce the need to enter illegally in the first place—also good.

Joined with the enhanced border security they propose, these ideas would address the immigration challenge as well as anyone knows how. (Details matter, and my colleagues will have more to say, I’m sure.)

But then there is their gratuitous national ID proposal for all American workers, and stepped up interior enforcement. “Interior enforcement” is a euphemism for “rounding up illegal workers” under some administrations and “raiding employers” under others.

This is the most specific Senator Schumer has ever been about his biometric national ID proposal, though he’s had it in mind since at least 2007. But it is hardly satisfactory, and the claim there will be no national ID database is almost certainly not true.

Here is the paragraph that captures the senators’ plan:

We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card. Each card’s unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone’s information. The cards would not contain any private information, medical information, nor tracking devices. The card will be a high-tech version of the Social Security card that citizens already have.

I’ll parse the senators’ description of their national ID plan here. In a later post, I’ll examine how the Schumer-Graham biometric national ID stacks up in terms of privacy, cost, and other considerations. Of course, in the decade or two it will take to build this extravagant national identity system, we will learn much more than I can predict.

We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card.

First, let there be no doubt that this is a national ID card. As I’ve written in past, a national ID has three characteristics: It is national—this is. It’s practically or legally required—this is. And it’s for identification—yep.

Students of card security will recognize one of the adjectives in the sentence as rather extravagant.  No, it’s not “high-tech”—that’s a throwaway. The extravagant claim is “fraud-proof.”

The senators may mean one of  three things, only one of which might be true. All three have to be true or their implication of a bullet-proof card system is false:

1) Impervious to fraud in issuance. Issuance is the weakest link in card security. Today at the hundreds and hundreds of DMVs across the country, ingenious young people (under 21—understand their motivation?) regularly submit identity documents falsely—siblings’ birth certificates or driver’s licenses, for example, or fake Social Security cards, utility bills, and such. Illegal aliens do too. Many DMV workers are gulls. Some can be made willing gulls for the right price. The same will be true of Social Security Administration workers. If the motivation is high enough, there is no practical way of making a national identity document fraud-proof in issuance.

2) Impervious to alteration. With various printing methods, secure card stocks, and encryption, card security is the easiest to do. It is possible to create a card that can’t be altered except at extraordinary expense.

3) Impervious to forgery. Odd though it may seem, technology does not govern whether a card can be forged—motivation does. Any card can can be forged if the price is right. Were a single card to provide entrée  to work in the United States, it’s virtually guaranteed that criminal enterprises would forge the physical card and defeat the digital systems they need to.

The idea of a “fraud-proof” card (in whatever sense the senators mean) sounds nice. But it doesn’t bear up under the stresses to be encountered by a national ID system that governs whether people can earn a living (and probably much more). During the decade or more that this system is being designed and implemented, new ways of attacking biometrics and encryption will emerge. A reasonably ”fraud-proof” card today is not still fraud-proof in 2020.

Each card’s unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone’s information.

It is possible to have a biometric card without a biometric database. The card would hold a digital description of the relevant biometric (such as fingerprint or iris scan). That algorithm would be compared by the card or by a reader to the person presenting it, determining wether it should be accepted as theirs.

The promise not to create a biometric database is a welcome one. The senators should require—in law—that the enrollment process and technology be fully open and transparent so that non-government technologists can ensure that the system does not secretly or mistakenly collect biometrics.

But the promise not to create a national identity database is almost certainly false.

Let’s review how an identity card is issued at a motor vehicle office today: People take the required documents to a DMV and hand them over. If the DMV accepts their documentation, the DMV creates a file about the person containing at least the material that will be printed on the card—including the person’s photograph. Then the DMV gives the person a card.

What would happen if DMVs didn’t keep this file? A couple of things—things that make the senators’ claim not to be creating a national identity database highly doubtful.

If there were no file and a card were lost or stolen, for example, the person would have to return to the card issuer again—with all the documents—and run through the entire process again. Because they have databases, DMVs today can produce a new ID and mail it to the address of record based on a phone call or Internet visit. (They each have their own databases—much better than a single database or databases networked together.)

If no file exists, multiple people could use the very same documents to create ID card after ID card after ID card in the same name but with different biometrics. Workers in the card issuing office could accept bribes with near impunity because there would be no documents proving that they had issued cards wrongly. Criminal use of the system would swamp it.

So that they can provide customer service, and for security reasons, state DMVs keep information about license holders, including a biometric of a sort—a photograph. Senators Schumer and Graham may think that they are designing a database-free biometric identity system—such a thing can exist—but the realities they confront will drive it to become a full-scale biometric national identity database.

The cards would not contain any private information, medical information, nor tracking devices.

This is a welcome pledge, and to fulfill it, they should bar—in law—the use of writeable chips or RFID chips. And there is no way to prevent the card itself from acting as a tracking device. It will be a pointer to private medical information, financial information, and much more.

Understand that the Social Security number is an identifier. It is already used in government, throughout the financial services system, and in much of health care to administer services and benefits, and to perform surveillance (both for good or for bad).

With a uniform biometric Social Security card in the hands of every worker, the card would be demanded at more and more points in society. Americans would have to present their national ID when they use credit cards, when they check into hotels, at bars, in airports, pharmacies, doctors’ offices, and so on.

A card may contain only a biometric algorithm and a Social Security number—unlikely though that may be. It will still act as a tracking device when it integrates with the card readers and databases that grow up around it.

The card will be a high-tech version of the Social Security card that citizens already have.

This claim—to be making a simple, sensible change to the Social Security card—is wrong. The biometric national identification scheme Senators Schumer and Graham propose is much, much more than a “high-tech” Social Security card. It’s the biggest, most difficult identity system ever proposed. It will take decades and tens or hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to build.

About the only similarity between today’s Social Security card and the biometric national ID card these senators propose is that they’re both rectangular.

In an earlier post, I called Senator Graham’s support of Schumer’s national ID plan inexplicable (before taking a stab at explaining it). Seeing the outline of their entire proposal, which would alleviate various pressures and begin a welcome transition back toward the rule of law in the immigration area, I am truly at a loss to understand why they would attach this grauitous and punitive plan to force law-abiding American citizens into a biometric national ID system.

Senators, why not do it without the national ID?

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy, Trade and Immigration

Disappointing Start for Immigration Reform

By
Daniel Griswold

The good news is that a bill has been introduced in the House this week under the broad heading of immigration reform. Even during a recession, Congress should be working to change our immigration system to reflect the longer-term needs of our economy for foreign-born workers.

The bad news is that the actual bill put in the hopper by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-IL, on Tuesday would do nothing to solve the related problems of illegal immigration and the long-term needs of our economy.

As I argued in a recent blog post and a Washington Times op-ed, immigration reform must include expanded opportunities for legal immigration in the future through a temporary worker visa.

Any so-called reform that is missing this third leg will be doomed to fail. We will simply be repeating the mistakes of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to 2.7 million illegal workers and ramped up enforcement, but made no provision for future workers. Rep. Jeff Flake, R-AZ, agrees.

Topics: 
Trade and Immigration

Tuesday Links

  • In the past eight months, the unemployment rate has jumped from 7.2 percent to 10.2 percent. Here’s why.
  • Three trillion reasons to hope the Senate is not as fiscally reckless as their counterparts in the House on health care reform.
  • Obama a federalist? Not quite: “Not yet a year into his administration, Obama’s record on 10th Amendment issues is already clear: He’ll let the states have their way when their policies please blue team sensibilities and he’ll call in the feds when they don’t.” More here.
  • It’s time to get immigration reform right: “Republican leaders need to liberate themselves from the Lou Dobbs minority within their own ranks that will oppose any legalization. Democratic leaders need to face down their labor-union constituency that opposes any workable temporary-visa program. Working together, President Obama and a bipartisan majority in Congress can seize the current opportunity to reform the immigration system and finally fix the problem of illegal immigration.”
Topics: 
General

Have Mexican Dishwashers Brought California to Its Knees?

By
Daniel Griswold

workerAn article published this week by National Review magazine blames the many problems of California on—take a guess—high taxes, over-regulation of business, runaway state spending, an expansive welfare state? Try none of the above. The article, by Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute, puts the blame on the backs of low-skilled, illegal immigrants from Mexico and the federal government for not keeping them out.

Titled “Catching Up to Mexico: Illegal immigration is depleting California’s human capital and ravaging its economy,” the article endorses high-skilled immigration to the state while rejecting the influx of “the poorly educated, the unskilled, and the illiterate” immigrants that enter illegally from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.

Before swallowing the article’s thesis, consider two thoughts:

One, if low-skilled, illegal immigration is the single greatest cause of California’s woes, how does the author explain the relative success of Texas? As a survey in the July 11 issue of The Economist magazine explained, smaller-government Texas has avoided many of the problems of California while outperforming most of the rest of the country in job creation and economic growth. And Texas has managed to do this with an illegal immigrant population that rivals California’s as a share of its population.

Two, low-skilled immigrants actually enhance the human capital of native-born Americans by allowing us to move up the occupational ladder to jobs that are more productive and better paying. In a new study from the Cato Institute, titled “Restriction or Legalization? Measuring the Economic Benefits of Immigration Reform,” this phenomenon is called the “occupational mix effect” and it translates into tens of billions of dollars of benefits to U.S. households.

Our new study, authored by economists Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer, found that legalization of low-skilled immigration would boost the incomes of American households by $180 billion, while further restricting such immigration would reduce the incomes of U.S. families by $80 billion.

That is a quarter of a trillion dollar difference between following the policy advice of National Review and that of the Cato Institute. Last time I checked, that is still real money, even in Washington.

Topics: 
Trade and Immigration

Are Democrats Serious about Immigration Reform?

By
Daniel Griswold

President Obama is meeting today with a bipartisan group of lawmakers to talk about reforming our broken immigration system. The challenge for both parties will be whether they can overcome opposition within their respective bases to expanding legal immigration.

For Republicans, the chief opposition remains the faction of talk-radio-driven conservatives who just don’t like immigration, period, especially when it comes from Latin America. For Democrats, who now run Washington, the chief opposition to allowing more foreign workers to enter the country legally is represented by organized labor.

As the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, advocates of immigration reform “worry that Democrats will defer to the AFL-CIO on the issue of legal immigration. The labor confederation has opposed a robust guest-worker program or higher levels of legal immigration, fearing they would depress wages. A larger labor presence would splinter the coalition of business and pro-immigration groups that embraced past immigration efforts, only to see them falter in the Senate.”

As I’ve argued consistently in the past, immigration reform is not worth pursuing if it does not include expanding future flows of legal immigrants, both highly skilled and lower-skilled workers.  If Congress confines itself to legalizing the 8 million or so workers already here illegally, with a vow to get tougher on enforcement, then we are just repeating the mistake of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

We will know if President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress are serious about fixing the problem of illegal immigration if they face down their labor-union allies and embrace a workable, market-oriented expansion of legal immigration. Otherwise, we are in for more futility, frustration and failure.

Topics: 
Trade and Immigration

Questions for Heritage: REAL ID

By
Jim Harper

The Heritage Foundation’s “The Foundry” blog has a post up called “Questions for Secretary Napolitano: Real ID.”

Honest advocates on two sides of an issue can come to almost perfectly opposite views, and this provides an example, because I find the post confused, wrong, or misleading in nearly every respect.

Let’s give it a brief fisking. Below, the language from the post is in italics, and my comments are in roman text:

Does the Obama Administration support the implementation of the Real ID Act?

(Hope not … .)

Congress has passed two bills that set Real ID standards for driver’s licenses in all U.S. jurisdictions.

REAL ID was a federal law that Congress passed in haste as an attachment to a military spending bill in early 2005. To me, “REAL ID standards” are the standards in the REAL ID Act. I’m not sure what other bill the post refers to.

Given the legitimate fear of REAL ID creating a federal national ID database, section 547 of the Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009 barred the creation of a new federal database or federal access to state databases with the funds in that bill. (Thus, these things will be done with other funds later.)

The Court Security Improvement Act allowed federal judges and Supreme Court Justices to withhold their addresses from the REAL ID database system, evidently because the courts don’t believe the databases would be secure.

And in the last Congress, bills were introduced to repeal REAL ID in both the House and Senate. Congress has been backing away from REAL ID since it was rammed through, with Senators like Joe Lieberman (I-CT) calling REAL ID unworkable.

It’s unclear what the import of the sentence is, but if it’s trying to convey that there is a settled consensus around the REAL ID law, that is not supported by its treatment in Congress.

The Real ID legislation does not create a federal identification card, but it does set minimum security standards for driver’s licenses.

This sentence is correct, but deceptive.

REAL ID sets federal standards for state identification cards and drivers’ licenses, refusing them federal acceptance if they don’t meet these standards. Among those standards is uniformity in the data elements and a nationally standardized machine readable technology. Interoperable databases and easily scanned cards mean that state-issued cards would be the functional equivalent of a federally issued card.

People won’t be fooled if their national ID cards have the flags of their home states on them. When I testified to the Michigan legislature in 2007, I parodied the argument that a state-issued card is not a national ID card: “My car didn’t hit you — the bumper did!”

All states have either agreed to comply with these standards or have applied for an extension of the deadline.

It’s true that all states have either moved toward complying or not, but that’s not very informative. What matters is that a dozen states have passed legislation barring their own participation in the national ID plan. A couple of states received deadline extensions from the Department of Homeland Security despite refusing to ask for them. Things are not going well for REAL ID.

Secure identification cards will make fraudulent documents more difficult to obtain and will also simplify employers’ efforts to check documents when verifying employer eligibility.

It’s true that REAL ID would make it a little bit harder to get - or actually to use - fraudulent documents, because it would add some very expensive checks into the processes states use when they issue cards.

It’s not secure identification cards that make fraudulent documents harder to obtain - the author of this post has the security problems jumbled. But, worse, he or she excludes mentioning that a national ID makes it more valuable to use fraudulent documents. When a thing is made harder to do, but proportionally more valuable to do, you’ll see more of it. REAL ID is not a recipe for a secure identity system; it’s a recipe for a more expensive and invasive, but less secure identity system.

Speaking of invasive, this sentence is a confession that REAL ID is meant to facilitate background checks on American workers before they can work. This is a process I wrote about in a paper subtitled “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.” The dream of easy federal background checks on all American workers will never materialize, and we wouldn’t want that power in the hands of the federal government even if we could have it.

Real ID is a sensible protection against identify fraud.

The Department of Homeland Security’s own economic analysis of REAL ID noted that only 28% of all reported incidents of identity theft in 2005 required the presentation of an identification document like a driver’s license. And it said REAL ID would reduce those frauds “only to the extent that the [REAL ID] rulemaking leads to incidental and required use of REAL ID documents in everyday transactions, which is an impact that also depends on decisions made by State and local governments and the private sector.”

Translation: REAL ID would have a small, but speculative effect on identity fraud.

Congress is set to introduce legislation next week that could largely repeal the Real ID.

The bill I’ve seen is structured just like REAL ID was, and it requires states to create a national ID just like REAL ID did. REAL ID is dying, but the bill would revive REAL ID, trying to give it a different name.

Some groups oppose this version of REAL ID because it takes longer to drive all Americans into a national ID system and frustrates their plans to do background checks on all American workers. But it’s still the REAL ID Act’s basic plan for a national ID.

The Administration should put pressure on Congress to ensure that this legislation does not effectively eliminate the Real ID standards.

Why the administration would pressure Congress to maintain the national ID law in place - by any name - is beyond me. REAL ID is unworkable, unwanted, and unfixable.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano signed legislation as Arizona’s governor to reject the REAL ID Act. Her predecessor at DHS, Michael Chertoff, talked tough about implementing the law but came up just shy of lighting the paper bag in which he left it on Napolitano’s doorstep.

The REAL ID revival bill that is being so widely discussed is likely to be both the national ID plan that so many states have already rejected and deeply unsatisfying to the anti-immigrant crowd. Congress rarely fails to grasp a lose-lose opportunity like this, so I expect it will be introduced and to see it’s sponsors award themselves a great deal of self-congratulations for their courageous work. You can expect that to receive a fisking here too.

Topics: 
Telecom, Internet & Information Policy, Trade and Immigration

Week in Review: Successful Voucher Programs, Immigration Debates and a New Path for Africa

Federal Study Supports School Vouchers

arne_duncanLast week, a U.S. Department of Education study revealed that students participating in a Washington D.C. voucher pilot program outperformed peers attending public schools.

According to The Washington Post, the study found that “students who used the vouchers received reading scores that placed them nearly four months ahead of peers who remained in public school.” In a statement, education secretary Arne Duncan said that the Obama administration “does not want to pull participating students out of the program but does not support its continuation.”

Why then did the Obama administration “let Congress slash the jugular of DC’s school voucher program despite almost certainly having an evaluation in hand showing that students in the program did better than those who tried to get vouchers and failed?”

The answer, says Cato scholar Neal McCluskey, lies in special interests and an unwillingness to embrace change after decades of maintaining the status quo:

It is not just the awesome political power of special interests, however, that keeps the monopoly in place. As Terry Moe has found, many Americans have a deep, emotional attachment to public schooling, one likely rooted in a conviction that public schooling is essential to American unity and success. It is an inaccurate conviction — public schooling is all-too-often divisive where homogeneity does not already exist, and Americans successfully educated themselves long before “public schooling” became widespread or mandatory — but the conviction nonetheless is there. Indeed, most people acknowledge that public schooling is broken, but feel they still must love it.

Susan L. Aud and Leon Michos found the program saved the city nearly $8 million in education costs in a 2006 Cato study that examined the fiscal impact of the voucher program.

To learn more about the positive effect of school choice on poor communities around the world, join the Cato Institute on April 15 to discuss James Tooley’s new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.

Obama Announces New Direction on Immigration

The New York Times reports, “President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.”

In the immigration chapter of the Cato Handbook for Policymakers, Cato trade analyst Daniel T. Griswold offered suggestions on immigration policy, which include:

  • Expanding current legal immigration quotas, especially for employment-based visas.
  • Creating a temporary worker program for lower-skilled workers to meet long-term labor demand and reduce incentives for illegal immigration.
  • Refocusing border-control resources to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country.

In a 2002 Cato Policy Analysis, Griswold made the case for allowing Mexican laborers into the United States to work.

For more on the argument for open borders, watch Jason L. Riley of The Wall Street Journal editorial board speak about his book, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders.

In Case You Couldn’t Join Us
Cato hosted a number of fascinating guests recently to speak about new books, reports and projects.

  • Salon writer Glenn Greenwald discussed a new Cato study that exadead-aidmines the successful drug decriminalization program in Portugal.
  • Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute explained his project to build self-sufficient deep-sea platforms that would empower individuals to break free of national governments and start their own societies on the ocean.
  • Dambisa Moyo, author of the book Dead Aid, spoke about her research that shows how government-to-government aid fails. She proposed an “aid-free solution” to development, based on the experience of successful African countries.

Find full-length videos to all Cato events on Cato’s events archive page.

Also, don’t miss Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast with legal policy analyst David Rittgers on Obama’s surge strategy in Afghanistan.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics

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