The disappearance of Sen. Charles Schumer's (D-N.Y.) proposal for a national employment card gets my nomination for mystery of the year in the national immigration debate. Just a few years ago, Schumer trumpeted the idea as essential to effective immigration reform.
"It is now possible to create a largely forgery-proof national employment card," Schumer declared in his 2007 book, Positively American. "The card would have a little chip that recorded unique biometric identifying information such as an individual's retinal or facial features. It is possible to affordably mass produce biometric IDs that would be prohibitively expensive to counterfeit."
But as the Associated Press noted, in March Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has joined Schumer in leading the push for the Gang of Eight reform bill, declared the idea inoperative.
"That seems to have been cost-prohibitive, so we're looking at other ways to achieve the same goal," Graham told reporters.
But who decided that it is too expensive? And how? To use the phrase in vogue for border security, what were the metrics?
The AP story said Graham "declined to say how much such a card would cost." But the story did cite a study by the Warren Institute at the University of California that estimated start-up costs of more than $22 billion.
Well, it turns out that the study was authored by the Warren Institute's director of immigration policy, Aarti Kohli. Ms. Kohli is certainly a respectable figure with impressive experience in immigration policy. But she has a resume loaded with work for individuals and groups that have long resisted enforcement of immigration laws and promoted expansive immigration policies.
For instance, Kohli was immigration counsel to former Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), was a consultant for the National Immigration Forum, and worked as assistant legislative director at the UNITE union.
Maybe Sens. Graham and Schumer didn't rely on Ms. Kohli's work to justify their decision to walk away from the biometric ID and move instead toward a less secure and less expensive upscale version of E-Verify. But given Schumer's enthusiastic previous commitment to the technology, surely he should explain why he walked away from it.
"The whole nub of the illegal immigration problem is the jobs available to illegal immigrants," Schumer wrote in his book. He added, "The ID will make it easy for employers to avoid undocumented workers, which will allow for tough sanctions against employers who break the law, which will lead to no jobs being available for illegal immigrants, which will stop illegal immigration."
Schumer presumably researched the ID proposal carefully before presenting it in his book. Can an idea that was so good just a few years ago be a non-starter now, particularly given the senator's willingness to spend billions of dollars more for Border Patrol agents, border technology, and the border fence?
After all, just last week. Sen. Graham insisted that a mandatory system of worker verification would be the country's best "virtual fence".
