If you have a job, a panel convened by the University of Denver thinks you should have a national ID card.

DU’s “Report of the Strategic Issues Panel on Immigration” says:

The idea of a national card for identifying citizens and non-citizens has become the third rail of immigration politics. But in truth, without a means of positive identification, it makes very little difference what immigration policies are adopted because they can’t be effectively enforced. A means of positive identification is essential to prevent the employment of illegal immigrants.

Only the panel’s narrow framing leads to this conclusion.

Restrictive immigration policies may require a national ID and federal background check system because such policies are so at odds with employers’ and workers’ interests. The federal government will have to continually investigate workers and employers to maintain them.

But policies that align immigration rates with our country’s demand for new workers would foster the rule of law naturally—without a national ID, worker surveillance, and an overweening federal government.

Much hand-waving animates the report. It imagines a card system that is “extremely difficult or impossible to counterfeit.” But that’s a product of how much value your card system controls—the more value, the more effort goes into forging it—and access to employment in the U.S. is worth a lot. The report says nothing about fraud in the card issuance process.

Nor does it calculate the expense to our nation’s seven million employers—many of them small businesses, families, and individuals—for getting card readers. Their proposal to hold employers harmless is an embossed invitation to fraud on the system—unless those inexpensive card readers are also fingerprint or iris scanners. If the system is going to work, someone legally responsible has to verify that the card belongs to the person presenting it. And if you’re going to use biometric scanners, there is a lot of work yet to be done to control error rates.

Of privacy concerns, the panel says it listened to “experts and advocates on all sides.” But the advisors listed in the report do not include any privacy expert or civil liberties advocate. They do include an advocate for restrictionist immigration policies, a police chief, a former U.S. attorney, a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, a Colorado state homeland security official, a federal Department of Homeland Security official, a sheriff, the Colorado Attorney General, and a CIA officer. It is unlikely that the one “immigrant rights” advocate addressed the privacy issues for U.S. citizens, much less the technical and data security problems.

It’s not new for people focusing on one issue to think that a national ID is their solution. In fact, it’s typical for people to think that sprinkling technology over economic and social problems can solve them.