National ID Plan Insults Americans

President Obama recently gave his thumbs-up to an immigration compromise plan formulated by Chucky “Why Am I So Annoying” Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that includes a national biometric ID card for all Americans.  I already outlined here some of the major objections to any national biometric ID but the government is moving forward with the plan anyway.

I expected this proposal to be terrifying, but I wasn’t prepared to be personally insulted.  As was reported here:

“The cards would include biometric information designed to prevent counterfeiting — but the senators said the information would not be stored in a government database.”

I don’t believe in conspiracies, but when the government says they are going to set up a national biometric ID card BUT not store all of our information in a database, it smells fishy.  Sure . . . (wink-wink) the national biometric ID won’t store our personal biological information in a government database . . . and our Social Security numbers will only be used to track our Social Security benefits, right?    Nothing good has ever come about from the issuance of a national ID, let alone one that includes biometric information.

But the Senator’s statements, if true, negate the entire purpose of have a national biometric ID!  If the information is not stored in a database, there is nothing to check your national biometric ID card against.  That would make it incredibly easy to counterfeit.  How is the government, or a private employer, supposed to know it’s a forgery?  All national biometric ID cards, or ID cards of any type, require a central database of personal information to have a chance at being successful.  What are Graham and Schumer thinking?

The good parts of the Senator’s plan, of which there are several, are totally overshadowed by this and the extension of an Electronic Employment Verification System (EEVS).  These provisions have turned what could be an important bill into a terrifying extension of government power that won’t even cut down on illegal immigration.  A bill like this that focuses on enforcement and amnesty only will not be successful.

Undocumented immigration is a problem but the solution is not scanning American’s biological information into a biometric national ID card that must be presented to employers and checked against a mandatory EEVS.  The solution is to allow mass legal immigration to the United States to move immigration out of an unregulated black market and into the legal market.  Americans are already punished by the government’s insistence that legal immigration be kept at artificially low levels; let’s not punish them more by submitting their most intimate information to a government database.