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If You Like the Surveillance State, You’ll Love E-Verify – Article by Ron Paul

If You Like the Surveillance State, You’ll Love E-Verify – Article by Ron Paul

The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
June 30, 2013
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From massive NSA spying, to IRS targeting of the administration’s political opponents, to collection and sharing of our healthcare information as part of Obamacare, it seems every day we learn of another assault on our privacy. Sadly, this week the Senate took another significant, if little-noticed, step toward creating an authoritarian surveillance state. Buried in the immigration bill is a national identification system called mandatory E-Verify.

The Senate did not spend much time discussing E-Verify, and what little discussion took place was mostly bipartisan praise for its effectiveness as a tool for preventing illegal immigrants from obtaining employment. It is a tragedy that mandatory E-Verify is not receiving more attention, as it will impact nearly every American’s privacy and liberty.

The mandatory E-Verify system requires Americans to carry a “tamper-proof” Social Security card. Before they can legally begin a job, American citizens will have to show the card to their prospective employers, who will then have to verify their identity and eligibility to hold a job in the US by running the information through the newly created federal E-Verify database. The database will contain photographs taken from passport files and state driver’s licenses. The law gives federal bureaucrats broad discretion in adding other “biometric” identifiers to the database. It also gives the bureaucracy broad authority to determine what features the “tamper-proof” card should contain.

Regardless of one’s views on immigration, the idea that we should have to ask permission from the federal government before taking a job ought to be offensive to all Americans. Under this system, many Americans will be denied the opportunity for work. The E-Verify database will falsely identify thousands as “ineligible,” forcing many to lose job opportunities while challenging government computer inaccuracies. E-Verify will also impose additional compliance costs on American businesses, at a time when they are struggling with Obamacare implementation and other regulations.

According to David Bier of Competitive Enterprise Institute, there is nothing stopping the use of E-Verify for purposes unrelated to work verification, and these expanded uses could be authorized by agency rule-making or executive order. So it is not inconceivable that, should this bill pass, the day may come when you are not be able to board an airplane or exercise your Second Amendment rights without being run through the E-Verify database. It is not outside the realm of possibility that the personal healthcare information that will soon be collected by the IRS and shared with other federal agencies as part of Obamacare will also be linked to the E-Verify system.

Those who dismiss these concerns as paranoid should consider that the same charges were leveled at those who warned that the PATRIOT Act could lead to the government collecting our phone records and spying on our Internet usage. Just as the PATRIOT Act was only supposed to be used against terrorists but is now used to bypass constitutional protections in matters having noting to do with terrorism or national security, the national ID/mandatory E-Verify database will not only be used to prevent illegal immigrants from gaining employment. Instead, it will eventually be used as another tool to monitor and control the American people.

The recent revelations of the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans, plus recent stories of IRS targeting Tea Party and similar groups for special scrutiny, demonstrates the dangers of trusting government with this type of power. Creation of a federal database with photos and possibly other “biometric” information about American citizens is a great leap forward for the surveillance state. All Americans who still care about limited government and individual liberty should strongly oppose E-Verify.

Ron Paul, MD, is a former three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President and Congressman from Texas.

This article is reprinted with permission.

Are Immigration Laws Like Jim Crow? – Article by David Bier

Are Immigration Laws Like Jim Crow? – Article by David Bier

The New Renaissance Hat
David Bier
July 7, 2012
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Alabama Governor Robert Bentley was forced to defend his state’s harsh immigration law recently against charges that it amounts to a return to segregation-era racially biased policies.  “What took place in the civil rights era was a series of unlawful actions against lawful residents,” Bentley said in response to the charges. “It was a shameful chapter in our state’s history. The immigration issue of today is entirely different.”

Parallels to segregation might be slightly overdone, but to call immigration policies “entirely different” is disingenuous. America’s restrictive immigration system was invented by the Eugenics Research Institute’s future president, Rep. Albert Johnson (R-Washington), who wanted to protect America’s racial purity from, in the words he quoted from a State Department official, “unassimilable . . . filthy . . . and often dangerous” foreigners. While such laws are no longer justified on racial grounds, their impacts today are just as ethnically disparate—more than 80 percent of immigrants labeled “illegal” are Hispanic, and 97 percent (pdf) of deportees are Hispanic.

Nor was segregation “unlawful”—it was a bizarre system of legal controls. Although it’s best known as a system of social control, it was just as much a system of economic regulation. Jim Crow began humbly—with segregated streetcars in Georgia in 1891—but quickly escalated, imposing on southern businesses ever more burdensome requirements: twice the number of bathrooms, waiting rooms, ticket counters, phone booths, even cocktail lounges. The president of Southeastern Greyhound told the Wall Street Journal in 1957, “It frequently costs fifty percent more to build a terminal with segregated facilities.”

Businessmen Conscripted

Since laws that intend to control personal behavior are so rarely enforceable, governments conscript business people to act as de facto State agents. In this way social controls quickly morph into economic regulations. It is often forgotten that the railroad in the infamous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) actually helped fight  the “separate but equal” doctrine because it “saddled employers with the burden of becoming the state’s race policemen.” Immigration law, which began as a way to restrict the movement of foreigners into the United States, has followed exactly the same pattern. Today a vast portion of America’s immigration code targets businesses, not foreigners.

Jim Crow’s regulatory state only affected businesses that served both white and African American patrons. For most small businesses, the costs of the regime were simply too great. Similarly, for many businesses today, hiring migrant workers has just become too dangerous. “I always relate it to tax law,” labor law consultant Barlow Curran recently told the Tampa Tribune. “Federal tax law is so complicated that if the IRS audits you, regardless of how careful you’ve been, they’ll probably find something. The same thing is true of farm labor law.” No wonder Immigration and Customs Enforcement has imposed $100 million in fines in just the last three years alone—more than the Bush administration’s previous eight years.

Alabama has only added to these regulatory threats. The state’s HB 56—enacted a year ago—mandated that employers use E-Verify to check the work authorization for potential employees. Over 60,000 Alabama businesses missed the deadline. If employers are unable to comply, they face license suspensions and may even be given the “business death penalty,” permanent closing.

As Isabel Wilkerson documents in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, more than six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow South and left many southern employers facing labor shortages. “Farmers . . . have [woken] up on mornings recently to find every Negro over 21 on his place gone,” editorialized the Macon Telegraph in 1916 as the Great Migration began. “And while our very solvency is being sucked out beneath us, we go about our affairs as usual.”

Fleeing the State

Alabama is discovering that harsh immigration laws can just as easily “suck the solvency out beneath” them. “From a business point of view, it’s a terrible piece of legislation,” Henry Hagood, CEO of Alabama Associated General Contractors, told Reuters. “My counterparts around the country are saying, ‘thanks for sending workers our way.’” Tens of thousands of workers have already fled the state. University of Alabama professor Samuel Addy found that losing these workers reduced the state’s GDP by between $2.3 billion and $10.8 billion.

Conservatives who profess a commitment to the free market must extend that commitment to the labor market. They must realize that harsh immigration laws have the same dire effects on business as other burdensome regulations. They limit not only the free movement of foreign workers but also the rights of American businesses to hire, transport, and associate freely. They need to go the same way as Jim Crow—into the dustbin of history.

David Bier is the immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.