Drivers license? Are you kidding me? Those things are handed out like candy and don't prove anything.
SS card? Not actually proof of identity. I know, right?
Birth certificate? Well, now we're getting somewhere. Wait. You changed your name? This seems fishy to me ... got anything else?
Passport? Excellent! justsolongasitisnotexpired.
Now. Let's play a game. How many Americans do you think have passports? Don't look it up, that's cheating. Give up? GOA put it at about 28% as of 2008. That's about 86 million passports for 305 million people. The labor force is about 153 million. Applying the same stats, that means about 43 million of the labor force has a passport. Sounds okay, doesn't it? And that's actually assuming that none of those passports have expired. Expired passports don't prove identity. Hell, even with the new outrageous Voter ID proposed amendment, an expired ID counts.
So, AT BEST, less than a third of the current US labor force can prove that they actually can work in the United States. It's a crime not to be able to, for whatever ridiculous reason It's also a crime, fyi, not to change your address w/in 30 days of a move, but under Voter ID, you can still use that as proof of identity, and oh yeah, y'know, VOTE. Under E-verify, an expired passport [or other ID, I am assuming] makes you a criminal. Okay, well, you're not technically a criminal, you just can't prove you're not.
As with Voter ID - these are some really interesting parallels I might have to post about later - the people with the least amount of resources and agency are going to be the ones most negatively affected by this.
And if that weren't enough ...
Let's keep playing a game, okay?
This, I am going to steal directly from Dan Crawford @ Angry Bear
When E-Verify finds an inconsistency between a name and that person's work authorization, it issues a "tentative nonconfirmation" (TNC), after which an employee has several days to contact SSA or DHS to correct the error or risk losing their job. Unfortunately, a significant number of these TNCs are issued in error. (Errors are usually due to clerical mistakes from inputting data, especially with hard-to-spell names or ones that have been hyphenated or changed, as well as errors by the workers themselves when filling out government forms.) In 2010, of the 16 million E-verify queries by employers, 128,000 (0.8 percent of the total) required the employee to go to SSA or call DHS to fix the problem. Of those 0.8 percent errors, 0.3 percent were discovered to be in error and were later corrected. But 0.5 percent -- over half of all errors -- were falsely issued "final nonconfirmations," essentially forcing their employer to wrongly fire them. 0.3 percent may not sound like very many, but with a total American workforce of 154 million, that translates to over 770,000 jobs lost.
That's ... impressive. That is, in fact, beyond impressive. And not in a good way.
Someone tell me why we're even DEBATING e-verify. Someone else please tell me why we thought it was a good idea to make it a crime to not be able to work. I'm pretty sure those rotting fields in Georgia wouldn't be rotting if that weren't the case. In fact, I'm not just pretty sure - I'm goddamned sure there would be oodles of blueberries if it wasn't criminal not to be able to work.
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