More than once I’ve come across reports in the immigration area that start from false premises. A good example is a report from the Smart Card Alliance titled “Securing Identity and Enabling Employment Verification: How Do Immigration Reform and Citizen Identification Align?”

In the second paragraph of the executive summary, the report states: “A robust system of identification and secure identification documents is a key requirement that needs to be addressed in the immigration reform debate.”

This premise is wrong. Reforming immigration law is what should be addressed in the immigration reform debate. Identity security, just like border control, will flow naturally from reforms to immigration law that create legal avenues for entry. There is no need to create a national ID.

You may disagree with my thinking on that, but can you present objective proof that I’m wrong? Some repeatable experiment showing to a high degree of certainty that identity systems must be a part of immigration reform? I suspect you’ll agree fair-mindedly that the proposition is subject to debate.

But the next paragraph says “This document limits itself to providing factual information to allow the reader to make educated and informed decisions.” Balderdash.

The “privacy” section of the report—less than a page of it—deals mostly with security, not the tougher problem of designing a system that allows law-abiding citizens to control personal information, both within the card system and in its likely uses.

The Smart Card Alliance, for sponsoring this report, and readers of it should ask themselves a searching question.