Comments on the article "The right way to mend immigration"

My comments on the article "The right way to mend immigration" by Senators Charles E. Schumer and Lindsey O. Graham
Friday, March 19, 2010
You can read the article here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/17/AR2010031703115.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Biometrically the crux of the article focuses on the following paragraph "We would require all U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want jobs to obtain a high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card. Each card's unique biometric identifier would be stored only on the card; no government database would house everyone's information. The cards would not contain any private information, medical information or tracking devices. The card would be a high-tech version of the Social Security card that citizens already have. "

Upgrading the Social Security card is a wonderful idea. Too many illegal immigrants use existing numbers to falsify their identity and mask as legitimate workers. While public opinion may be out on the immigrant trying to earn a living (albeit being in the country illegally) the true owner of the Social Security number can be penalized by having their identity compromised, needing to pay taxes on behalf of the other worker, not to mention having utilities, credit cards, and other services opened to a false identity. This form of identity theft can be quite damaging to the victim.

I applaud the efforts recognizing that it is too easy to learn the 8 digit code, a social security number, that unlocks a world of services within the United States.

The Senators are not aware of the conditions of establishing a unique biometric identifier. It needs to be collected, enrolled, validated and generated somewhere: i.e. a database. Not allowing the government to store in a secure database would cause the necessary information to be kept on commercial enterprises which are going to be less secure. Authenticating only to the card would trigger a great production of counterfeit cards that would send back a positive match; which would certainly raise the bar for fraudulent documents but not eliminate it.

Most importantly the Senators seems to overlook an important fact: If we suspect that 11 million immigrants are already in this country working illegally (let’s assume all of them have jobs) we are still talking about less than 3% of the working population. Burdening 97% may be too much for the public to bear.

Personally I favor national biometric identity cards; but let's plan for that being what it is and what it could do in terms of replacing many of the existing state and federal breeder documents such as Social Security Cards, Driver's Licenses, Sheriff's IDs, and a host of others. Creating something that would enable more services, rather than restrict for a few, is the right way to go and gain public acceptance. Dare I say, even enthusiasm.