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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

The new justification (to deter illegal immigration) is expecially obviously bogus because, as the law stands, people must already prove their "right to work" to get a job and their "right to rent" to rent accommodation. Illegal immigrants manage, they would manage, too, with digital IDs because some employers and landlords are fine exploiting them. Or the plan is in fact to be asked "papers, please" where ever you go and whatever you do.

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This is really easy to fake though and employers kind of have to take your word for it that the documentation you provide is real. I'm assuming a digital ID scheme will just bring all the data together and make it instantly verifiable for employers. I would normally be suspicious about this sort of thing but I do think a lack of a single entity bringing all the data together is limiting us technologically in the UK. What Estonia have done is awesome, it'd be cool for us to work toward something like that!

Why do they have to take your word for it? if you present a few forms of id (drivers license, etc) can't those be checked against a central DB?

is someone forging physical ID cards and also getting them real numbers somehow?

The people who have to do the check (businesses and landlords) don't have access to the system to check those numbers, or any training on what a real identify card or passport looks like.

A relative had this problem when renting out a spare room. How was she supposed to verify the Colombian passport shown to her?

No, it is not easy to fake.

As @vinay427 mentioned this is most digital now so you get a "share code" from the Home Office, which you provide to your prospective employer. In turn they go to the Home Office's website, input the code, and should get your picture, details, and entitlement to work.

That's on top of having a passport to go with it.

THats only if they ask for it.

I changed job recently, and they just wanted a passport.

If you're a foreigner on a visa(or an EU settled status resident), yes. If you are a British person(or pretending to be one) then you just need to show your employer your British passport(or one of several other acceptable documents), and obviously faking a picture of a passport is pretty trivial. And since employers generally don't have access to the system that can verify passports they take your word on the document being valid.

As someone who's just got their new British passport, faking the 3 pictures on it, and the whole passport itself, does not look trivial at all...

I think it is much, much, much more common to have dodgy employers/landlords who do not carry out the checks at all because they are fine exploiting illegal immigrants, and no type of ID card would solve that...

>>As someone who's just got their new British passport, faking the 3 pictures on it, and the whole passport itself, does not look trivial at all...

A lot of employers just want a photo/scan of a passport. I'm not saying making a whole fake passport is easy, it's obviously not - but modifying a picture of a passport is not exactly rocket science.

Yeah most employers just take photocopies of the ID for record keeping purposes and that's it.

Most people are paid cash in hand if they're working illegally realistically. I'm not sure that would change. But in enforcement it might since you could theoretically make it a legal requirement to produce the ID, that's the norm in many other countries.

Honestly the biggest problem is that government requires companies to verify identity of their employees but doesn't give them any means to do so. There was a recent case where a fish and chip shop owner was fined £40k for employing someone without a legal right to work in the UK, and the owner said the guy literally showed him his British passport, turns out it was a fake - but how was he(the business owner) supposed to know, if the government doesn't allow him to check this?

Articles in this case all say that the illegal worker only provided a photocopy of his alleged British passport.

I.e. the employer did not properly and seriously carry out the checks as he didn't ask for the original, hence the heavy fine.

"The business did not see the original copy of the man’s passport, which its owner, Mark Sullivan, said was a “clerical error”" [1]

As I commented previously it is hard to counterfeit a modern British passport in a way that looks genuine and obviously any checks require sight of the original passport...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/22/surrey-chipp...

I literally just got a job with a big British corporation and all they wanted was a photocopy of my passport, no one checked the original. So this practice seems at least relatively common.

This just means that incompetence, or worse, is widespread (not a surprise, though).

Then they will feign ignorance when fined 40k+.

Nah this is over come with data.

E.g. if a firm is doing better than its peer group with less employees on the books, something is suspect.

I have had many jobs and scenarios where I need to provide proof of residency and I have never once had a share code like you mention @mytailorisrich like this. The reality is that it doesn't happen like this. Usually about 6 months into your job someone forgets you haven't done the necessary checks and reaches out for you to send a couple of sketchy photos of your IDs so they can upload it to their HR system and forget about it.

You just cherry picked two examples which are not issues in other countries with ID cards.

ID cards can prove who is an illegal immigrant or not, and with the current atmosphere. I want to know and be confident that we can check people's status efficiently and correctly who's here.

Sure there might be some small process mishaps but for the safety of the nation, it is worth it.

> Sure there might be some small process mishaps but for the safety of the nation, it is worth it.

Just like that database that recognises your face and links it to your pornhub preferences is worth it, for the safety of the children?

I don't think you mean "for the safety of the Nation". I think you mean "for my piece of mind my business is unlikely to get caught in a sting operation".

I did not cherry-pick anything.

Anyone who is a legal immigrant can easily prove it and must prove it to live and work in the country. So what does that make anyone who cannot prove it?

The point is that digital IDs make no difference to illegal immigration, as can also be seen in countries that do have ID cards...

Everyone knows that none of the countries with mandatory ID have any illegal immigrants, right?

(sarcasm, obviously)

"but for the safety of the nation, it is worth it"

That's a pretty chilling phrase.

UK politics is very simple: People have a lot of economic grievances and they are frustrated. People are made to believe that the source of their problems are immigrants/non-white people. So for a lot of people in the UK, anything against immigrants, even more drastic measures, are worth it and it makes the government appear to do something about their problems. Nothing ever really gets better of course, but they have no way to think about it any other way.

Fair to add that, despite every winning party promising reduced immigration on some level, and everyone that wanted to remain in the EU rightfully annoyed that Brexiters were simply voting because of migration, nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard.

And no one will, because the UK wants cheap foreign labour. To no one's surprise, immigration rocketed after Brexit.

This allows the ruling party - the one whose names and faces keep changing, but whose policies don't - to keep using immigration for political leverage while also benefiting from it.

> nobody in power has ever given the people what they want in this regard

Net migration in the UK dropped by 400,000/yr in the last year and they’ve toughened the criteria further so seems unlikely it won’t drop further.

It doesn't really matter, people's grievances won't go away because those have nothing to do with immigrants anyway. They will just move on to the next scapegoat.

In particular, this is already done using a digital ID for foreign residents (at least on most visas) in the UK, which was phased in over the past few years.

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