Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 4, 1994 TAG: 9408040073
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The employment-verification system would theoretically make it as easy for a hiring manager to check an applicant as it is now for a department store clerk to check on a customer's credit card with a single phone call.
The database likely would combine the records of the Social Security Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and it could involve each state's driver's-licensing system, officials said.
Details would be developed and tested in the five pilot states, California, Florida, Texas, New York and Illinois.
In a report to be issued next month, the Commission on Immigration Reform unanimously will endorse the employment-verification system, an idea long proposed by conservatives who predict that it will deter illegal immigration.
What's turning some heads is that the commission is headed by former U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas, a liberal and leading civil rights advocate. Jordan gave a preview of the report Wednesday before a Senate subcommittee.
Immigration and civil liberties advocates have warned that such a database would be the first step toward a national identification card, which could mean increased discrimination toward Hispanics, Asians and other minorities - anyone who looks or sounds foreign-born. They have compared an ID card to the old South African passbooks required of blacks.
Their alarms kept an ID verification system out of the last two overhauls of U.S. immigration laws, in 1986 and 1990. But polls show that attitudes toward immigrants have been getting increasingly negative, especially as document fraud increases.
``The test project is merely a launching pad for a national computer registry and de facto ID card system that will make human guinea pigs of the millions of people who live in the states where the system is supposed to be tested,'' said Lucas Guttentag, director of the Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group, said, ``Even if we set up this system properly, there is no way to prevent it from becoming a vehicle for wholesale discrimination.''
But Jordan insisted that the system could be designed to avoid discrimination and safeguard privacy.
In her thundering, basso profundo voice, Jordan said she has spent her ``entire career'' working on civil rights and constitutional issues, and ``I would not be a party to any system which I thought was an unwarranted intrusion into the private life of people.''
Sen. Alan K. Simpson, R-Wyo., who pushed for a national registry in 1986 and 1990, complained that liberals twist the debate by conjuring up ``national ID tattoos'' and the like.
``That's not what we're talking about,'' Simpson said. Business owners and legal job applicants deserve ``a simpler, more fraud-resistant system,'' he said.
Democratic subcommittee members Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Paul Simon of Illinois didn't immediately comment on the database proposal. But California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who sat in on the hearing, endorsed it and said she is pursuing that and other expected recommendations of the commission.
by CNB