Bringing the Border War Home

What will Americans pay to keep out immigrants

Glenn Garvin from the October 1995 issue

(Page 6 of 8)

"Look, I designed the state of Florida's birth certificate," says Abagnale. "It's got a street price in Miami of $5,000, so it's obviously a very valuable document. But it's still ridiculously easy to defeat all the security I put into it. I'll tell you how. A forger comes to Miami, goes to the Bureau of Vital Statistics and asks to see the death records for 1948. They'll let him view them in the office. He picks out an infant who died at birth and copies down all the information it's got therethe mother's name, the father's, the time of birth, all that stuff.

"Then he walks right down the hall to another office where he can apply for a certified copy of the birth certificate. All he has to do to get it is to pay $5.00. And once he has that, he goes across town to a Motor Vehicle Department office and gets a driver's license in the name of the baby on the birth certificate. And with a driver's license, he can apply for all kinds of documents. For just 50 bucks, you can create 10 different identities for yourself in just a couple of days."

"I don't think people understand how many loopholes will be built into any attempt to create a national ID card," says immigration attorney Larrabee. "It has to do with the way our government is structured, federal rights versus states' rights. We have no federal birth card. Every state registers births differently, and none of them has ever made security a high priority.

"Birth certificates in Texas, for instance, were not even centrally registered until 1948. And even then it was done in a pretty slipshod way. Any birth reported to the state was just written in a big ledger book, without requiring any doctor's signature or anything."

Not that federal records are much more reliable. Until 1972, the Social Security Administration would take an applicant's word about his age and identity when issuing cards. In 1991, Gwendolyn King, the agency's commissioner, testified to Congress that more than 60 percent of Social Security numbers were based on unverified statements. "That, of course, means that the Social Security number simply cannot be used effectively as a means of identification," she added.

The only ones likely to find a national ID card a significant obstacle to working will be honest people who become accidentally snarled in red tape. And there are likely to be a lot of them. The card will depend heavily on INS records to establish work eligibilityrecords that, a 1989 Justice Department audit found, are incorrect 17 percent of the time. And a lot of people think that figure is way too low.

"The databases were not very good when I worked for the INS, and they're worse now," says attorney Larrabee. "I'd say they're wrong 50 percent of the time, and that's being generous." In one recent case, Larrabee represented a San Diego sock factory where the INS claimed to have found 15 illegal aliens working. But it turned out that nine had legal work permits, and two weren't even aliensthey were U.S. citizens. "I've had several other clients who experience 50 percent or greater error at the hands of the INS," he adds.

Because the victims of INS screw-ups are typically foreigners at the bottom end of the eco nomic food chain, we hear little about them. But that will certainly change when the national ID card comes on line. A GAO study in 1988 showed that about 65 million people in the United States change jobs or enter the work force each year. Let's suppose that somehow the INS, through a superhuman effort that defies all our previous experience with federal bureaucracy, whittles its error rate down to a minuscule 1 percent. That's 650,000 people thrown out of work by mistake every year. The vast majority of them are bound to be U.S. citizens, native-born and bred.

Of course, they'll get their jobs back. Eventually. When the computer goofed during the 1992 test of the telephone verification system, it took the INS up to two weeks to search a job applicant's file by hand. And that was dealing with 2,668 searches over the course of a year. How long will the searches take when there are 650,000 a year? Six weeks? A month? Two months? And while the unlucky victim of the computer is waiting, who will pay his rent and buy his groceries? Perhaps the Feinsteins and Brimelows will show an unexpected humanitarian streak and permit workers bounced by the computer to start working while their cases are investigated. But that will force companies to invest weeks or months in training employees who may not even be eligible to work.

There's another number tucked away in the footnotes of the telephone verification system study that is worth thinking about. A full nine months after the study was over, the fine print admit ted that four cases were still "pending." These were four people ruled ineligible to work who pro tested that they had the proper documents. As the study noted parenthetically, "employee is waiting for appointment with INS, awaiting further documentation, etc." That is, they were tethered to the ninth circle of bureaucratic hell.

"We're talking here about allowing a federal bureaucracy to decide whether people are entitled to have jobs," notes Jauregui, the accountant. "For a lot of people it's just going to be a nightmare. There was a story in The Washington Post a couple of weeks ago about ITT-Gillfin, which got overpaid almost eight million bucks on a federal contract. Right away the company said it had been overpaid and tried to give the money back. But the government insisted it was right. It took 15 months before ITT-Gillfin could get them to accept the check.

"So that's how promptly the federal government acts when a major U.S. corporation is trying to give it money. How do you think it will do when Jose Sanchez from East L.A. says he's been incorrectly denied a work permit? Give me a break!"

"The really horrible thing about this is that what we're talking about here with the 650,000 is a really optimistic scenarioan unrealistically optimistic scenario," observes John Miller of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a pro-immigration think tank. "Imagine a 5 percent scenario and you're up to 3.25 million people thrown out of work. Or a 10 percent scenario, with 6.5 million out of work. Either of those is probably more likely.

"The estimates of the illegal immigrant population of the United States run between 3 million and 4 million, out of a U.S. population of 260 million. That means maybe 1.5 percent of the U.S. population is illegal. Because of the actions of 1.5 percent of the population, suddenly the federal government has to monitor all the employment decisions made in this country? Doesn't that seem like a classic example of overreach?"

Well maybe not to some people. "There have always been people in government who are attracted by the idea of a national ID card," says the Hoover Institution's Anderson. "It's potentially usable for so many purposes that it gives the government a good deal of power over its citizens. One of the protections we have against invasive government power is its inability to keep track of us in every single thing we do. But a national ID card, coupled with computerized databases, removes that protection. And to some parts of the government, that is the very thing that makes it attractive."

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