Free The Memes Archive
April 2008
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4:26pm Wednesday April 23, 2008 (link)
Charles Hugh Smith wrote an item over at his blog, OfTwoMinds, supporting employment registries, and going over the top with penalties:Charge every employer, formal or informal, a $10,000 fine per day, per undocumented employee. If the employer can't pay, then liquidate their business (or home) and sell it at auction the following month.I replied with an article giving my opinion of the whole issue:
Read the rest here.
- The registries have the usual huge error rate -- something like 5% false negatives. You'll feel a lot worse about this system if your employer is forced to fire you (even white, native you) because of a database error. How long are you supposed to sit around while the government processes the paperwork to verify you are really an American?
- You will of course have to keep the government informed of every address change and every job taken, to keep you from "sharing" your ID with others. That might work fine if you are a suburban wage slave with a corporate job (although there will still be errors.) It doesn't work at all if you are a migrant worker, or just someone who takes odd jobs to make ends meet. Lots of people move regularly. You don't really want to be denied employment because the super-DMV that tracks identity hasn't processed your new address correctly.
- Registries are only as good as the source documents. If a birth certificate can be faked, you can use that to apply for your fake national ID/"right to work" card.
- The stronger the identity system, the more incentive there is to steal identities. Of course, I read an article recently saying that it's now so easy to steal IDs that the price is plummeting. It costs something like $500 to get the social security number, address and bank account details of an average American.
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