Fears of National ID With Immigration Bill
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Even with all the passive NSA spying in the news, it is hard to imagine a system that more fundamentally conflicts with traditional american values than one that lets the president determine who and who is not eligible to support themselves and their family.
Even if we assume it will never be used for political gain in the style of gerrymandering or direct persecution, just having an unreasonably high accuracy rate of 99.99% that means 1 out of 10,000 will find the government interfering with their ability to get a job. Meanwhile any person seeking to circumvent the system will probably find it easy enough since the security on all of the data sources is so varied - you just need one low-paid clerk in one town willing to put bogus entries in their system and it will feed up to E-Verify.
Because most people it would stop are brown.
_Most_ first-world countries already implement this, mostly without disastrous effects.
The strongest argument against this is probably that the US has unusually bad institutions - a more powerful argument in light of PRISM, etc. But it's not the case that a National ID card is indicative of instant tyranny.
Many first world countries are absent from that list, as well as all developed Common Law countries (e.g. UK, Australia, Canada, etc). I don't think US should be on that list either. While a National ID is indeed not an instant tyranny, it may well be a step in that direction.
One document conceeds "Surely this [laws mandating checks of people's ID cards] will be opposed by employers on the basis that it is not their duty to control entry into Australia" http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/NAAMedia/ShowImage.asp?B=3142...
The project was eventually scrapped due to privacy concerns and swung so far that there are now laws preventing certain government agencies (Taxation/Immigration/Welfare/Health Insurance etc.) from doing JOIN on each others databases unless it's overseen by a third party http://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-act/government-data-m... http://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-act/medicare-and-phar...
To make it worse, common documents like European driving license are sometimes rejected because they don't have labels in local language (that's why field numbers always match up!!!). So that's it, I really don't get why people don't want a common id for their own benefit. Tyranny can be there with or without ids.
It doesn't matter if you think that is actually true, or think that would be a problem.
This is where it's all been tending for some time anyway.
> within four years all employers would have to electronically submit information gathered from new employees, including citizens, to confirm that they are eligible to work in the United States.
Luckily, there'll be a lot fewer jobs in four years so no one will need to use it. /snark