An idea whose time has come

Tamar Jacoby at the Union Leader:

Last month, House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner succeeded in attaching his Real ID Act to a must-pass Iraq appropriations bill. Now that spending measure is coming up in the Senate, and though it’s unclear how the upper chamber will handle the congressman’s proposal, members are girding for an all-out fight over immigration.
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The bill’s history in the House, where it passed on a 261-161 vote, holds crucial lessons for the debate ahead. It’s no accident that only eight Republicans dared vote against it, or that even President Bush, who prefers a more measured approach to illegal immigration, ended up endorsing it. What Sensenbrenner grasps — and his opponents ignore at their peril — is that when it comes to immigration, what the public wants is control.

Yup.

The unavoidable answer — albeit deeply unpopular in this country — is a credible “employer verification” system: one that replaces existing fraud-prone employment practices with a better way of ensuring that businesses hire only legal residents.
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It’s hardly surprising that the last time we tried an employer-based approach — penalties against businesses that hire illegal workers are part of the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) that Congress passed in 1986 — it was so watered down as to be all but irrelevant. Still, unappealing as it may sound, an employer-verification system is probably the only way to remain a nation of immigrants and meet our labor needs without giving in to epidemic illegality of the kind we live with now.

The question is less “if” than “how”: how to make sure a new verification program is effective and that it preserves our rights — everyone’s rights. The first principle, a lesson learned from the failed IRCA sanctions, is that the task assigned to business must be one it can realistically perform. As is, we put employers in an impossible position: We require that they determine, merely by eyeballing an employee’s documents, whether that person is legally authorized to work. All new hires, citizens and foreign-born, must by law show some form of ID — the many possibilities include driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, U.S. or foreign passports, green cards and school IDs; some are enough alone, others only in combination — and many of the forged documents presented by illegal immigrants look convincing. Yet if employers ask too many questions, we accuse them of discrimination, and when there is a violation, we give them no clear guidance about how to handle it.

What businesses desperately want and need is a simple, streamlined, inexpensive method to make sure that they are on the right side of the law — to verify that their employees are legitimate and to protect themselves from legal jeopardy.

Gosh, it sounds like Polipundits longstanding proposal.