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Saturday, February 23, 2019

C J IN WELD COMMENT GREAT STUFF RE MIGRATION

A side note on that "employment authorization verification system"...


I'm a former prosecutor whose career straddled the implementation of that system, e-verify. My jurisdiction contained a high proportion of illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico and points south, in the agricultural sector.


At the time, e-verify merely confirmed whether the SSN and the name were a match. It didn't alert the potential employer that (for instance) there was someone else working under that SSN and name across the country. (It may be better now; I don't know.)


Before e-verify, there was a market for forged Social Security cards that were just good enough to afford potential employers plausible deniability that they were hiring illegal immigrants.


After e-verify, there grew a black market for real SSNs and the names actually associated with those numbers. More specifically, it created a market for real SSNs of real persons with Spanish-sounding surnames, which lent a paint coating of credibility to the illegal immigrant job applicant, who was (almost always) of Hispanic descent.


This black market created real problems for actual people whose identies were stolen, in ways the old "wink-wink, nudge nudge" system did not. It affected their credit, their tax returns, and sometimes caussed debt collectors to track them down and harass them.


If there is a larger point to this, it's that even well intentioned measures that look like pure common sense on paper, and may even be a net positive, are seldom quite as cheap as they look.

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