Draft legislation to fight illegal immigration is being excoriated by critics as a sneaky way to introduce a national ID system. Whether you call it a national ID or a national database, it will likely be abused by the government.
The bill is being packaged as job protection legislation. Yet, it will basically allow a national database to be populated in order protect American jobs from illegal immigrants. It does this by making the employment verification system e-verify mandatory for all employers in the United States.
It’s worse than just a database, though. The key safeguard from a previous version of the bill has been taken out. In a previous form of the bill the database was only going to be used for employment verification purposes.
The new version from Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, allows the database to be used for almost anything. Blame him for establishing this seeminly realife precursor to the Matrix, known as H.R. 2885.
According to Ars Technica, the database could opened up to anyone who is responsible for “granting access to, protecting, securing, operating, administering, or regulating part of the critical infrastructure.”
Let’s be honest here: this will likely lead to abuses of the database by government. It could also be another boondoggle that causes a lot of problems for American citizens.
The e-verify system would have to be used by everyone, and if it rejects you, you would not be able to work until you get the red tape of your real identity sorted out. Have you ever dealt with government bureaucracy before?
The people who work in government administration are not known for being accommodating. A victim of lazy clerical work could get a glitch in their e-verify entry and not be able to work. If it takes too long to prove they are who they say they are, then the victim could lose their job. It’s happened before in real life situations already – so please just don’t blow if off as wacky talk.
And employees all over the country will have no choice. Register in the database and risk government abuse or you don’t get to be employed in the United States.
And of course there are cyber security issues; for example, government databases can be hacked. Can you image all of the chaos this could cause? Not to mention the fact that it seems like a way to set up a national ID card scheme without anyone in government actually having to admit that’s what it is.
Can we please save ourselves the trouble and just scrap this “jobs protection” scheme?
The whole thing seems to be arrogant and the kind of thing that only authoritarian minded public servants would be interested in. If it’s such a great idea then why don’t they put it on the ballot?
It’s a cut and dry issue, right? It’s merely an electronic database bill that will protect all good Americans from losing their jobs to an illegal immigrant.
Obviously, this bill wasn’t put on the ballot because they know it probably wouldn’t pass – once people figured out that it requires biometric data (DNA, fingerprints, eye retinas and irises, voice patterns, facial patterns and hand measurements) as well as a social security number.
The Department of Homeland Security can’t even keep track of their own explosives, and we’re supposed to trust these jabronis with our biometric employment database information?
The fact this bill is even being considered seriously is proof that we are living in a police state.
