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The Weak Link in Immigration Control by David Simcox May 1989 David Simcox is Director of the Center for Immigration Studies,
Immigration control rests on a precarious paper structure of certificates, affidavits and identification documents. The public servants who distribute the complicated rewards and penalties of our immigration system must decide on the basis of documents with a dizzying diversity of origins and degree of reliability. These are the documents that attest to your identity and nationality, your occupation and education, and importantly—because our immigration system confers special rewards for kinship—your family ties. This dependence on questionable documents presented by interested parties compares in administrative absurdity to what would be an effort by the Internal Revenue Service to collect income taxes without W-2s or other corroboration—trusting the individual taxpayer to state honestly his taxable income. The Paradise of Document Forgers The United States can do little about the quality and reliability of foreign documents. But our nation manages the vital identification documents of its own residents with a remarkable complacency. In the words of the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, onetime chairman of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, the United States is a "document forgers' paradise." Basic civil documents are issued by over seven thousand jurisdictions. The lack of uniformity, uneven quality, and relaxed rules of issuance of many of these documents guarantees widespread abuse. Falsified or stolen vital statistics records become "breeder documents" for a chain of false documents that open the doors to highly-prized entitlements-legal resident status for illegal aliens, social security, food stamps, unemployment compensation, and guaranteed student loans. The birth certificate of most citizens is easily and, in some states, legally, obtainable by imposters, even though that document can become the first big step to unearned citizenship. Immigration control is not the only national interest at risk because of the nation's insouciant approach to the security of individual identification. The 1976 Federal Advisory Commission on False Identification (FACFI) found that easy access to false identification aided broad patterns of crime and abuse, from drug smuggling and money laundering to fraudulent veterans claims and evasion of warrants. Particularly troubling is the contamination by unreliable "breeder documents" of other identification systems that must depend on them. Some four million social security numbers are now being used by more than one person. With the legalization of three million illegal aliens under the 1986 amnesty, some state motor vehicle authorities have had to institute their own amnesties to reissue driver's licenses to newly legalized aliens who originally got them with false names and social security numbers. The 1986 amnesty itself bears witness to two decades of negligence in controlling illegal immigration. Nearly one fifth of the 1.8 million applicants for general amnesty originally entered the country not by sneaking across the border, but by using documents that were altered or obtained under false pretenses. Legalization itself has stimulated further widespread abuses of documents. Officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) estimate that half or more of the 1.2 million applicants for legal residence under the Special Agricultural Workers (SAW) program presented fraudulent information about themselves or their work histories. Enforcement Crippled by False Documents The central enforcement feature of the 1986 immigration reforms - penalties against employers of illegal aliens - has what could be a fatal flaw: it depends on the soundness of existing identification documents for employers to determine the job seeker's right to work in the United States. Document fraud has become a major enforcement hindrance. INS surveys of three hundred southern California businesses in early 1988 showed that virtually every one of them employed illegal alien workers who got around the law by presenting counterfeit identification. Interviews of three hundred illegal alien workers in southern California in 1988 by immigration scholar Wayne Cornelius revealed that forty-one percent of them either purchased fraudulent documents or borrowed those of a friend or relative. Some unscrupulous employers aid prospective employees to get false documents. Even well intentioned employers are hard pressed to judge the validity of the confusing variety of ID documents they receive. False documents are also undercutting the efforts of authorities to deny public assistance to illegal aliens under SAVE, a computer matching program to screen out the unentitled. Aliens able to present documents showing citizenship can bypass this check. The National Hunger for Reliable Identification Despite our vulnerability to massive illegal immigration and citizenship fraud, the widespread perception of the threat to individual privacy from a national ID card blocks serious remedies. FACFI itself refused to endorse the concept of a national ID card. And Congress, in enacting the 1986 immigration reforms, explicitly disavowed any intent to authorize one. Even as we hesitate about an effective national identification system, federal agencies, state governments and private companies have created far-reaching specialized identification systems linked to vast banks of data about millions of citizens. A complex society's insistence that we share more and more information about ourselves - and our vulnerability to misuse of this data - has heightened our need for reliable identification. The driver's license, though issued by the states with relatively few security precautions, has become a de facto national ID document - so much in demand that the states issue "non-drivers" cards to residents needing proof of their identity. Rather than protect our privacy, our present decentralized system jeopardizes the right of citizens to protection of the privacy and security of their own identities. Each of us runs the risk of having such uniquely personal documents as his birth certificate, academic credentials, social security number, and even death certificate appropriated by others. Screening Out the Ineligible: Telephone Verification In passing the 1986 reforms, Congress called for evaluations of the soundness of existing identification documents with recommendations for improvements. Following Congress's orders, INS in 1987 studied the feasibility of a system for confirming work eligibility by telephone; the General Accounting Office (GAO) evaluated the security of the social security card; and the Social Security Administration (SSA) in 1987 and 1988 tested a call-in system for validating the 210 million social security numbers now in use. INS found telephone verification feasible and now plans a pilot project permitting employers to use touchtone phones or "point of sale" devices to check the alien registration numbers of foreign job applicants against a data base held by INS. The INS master index will ultimately be expanded to include additional identifiers on each alien, such as social security numbers and even digital fingerprint codes. (State governments will tap the same master index to verify the legal status of alien applicants for public assistance). In its study of the social security card, the GAO concluded that the present requirement that the nation's 7 million employers judge the validity of literally hundreds of different acceptable documents cannot be made fraud-proof. GAO proposed that the social security card become the sole document for confirming work eligibility. Warning that the current social security card, with sixteen versions in use, is easily counterfeited, GAO recommended technical changes to make it secure. But GAO's study stressed the underlying dilemma in devising better identification - technical security features are of no avail if the breeder documents remain unreliable. SSA field office employees review millions of applications for cards each year. They must determine whether each applicant is who he says he is and whether the birth certificate and other documents he submits are genuine. Social security employees are able to verify less than one percent of the documents they look at. Fifty percent of a sample of social security employees interviewed by GAO believed that fraudulent documents were getting through. SSA concluded from its 1987-1988 study that a card validation system was technically feasible, though its high costs and the inherent shortcomings of the card as a reliable identifier would reduce its utility. SSA recommended as an alternative that all state drivers' licenses carry the bearer's social security number validated by SSA (29 states now require the number). SSA has opposed making its card a national identifier, chiefly because of the high cost of producing and issuing new cards. While it is technically possible to add security features to the card such as unique personal characteristics and biometric indicators (e.g. photos, and digitized fingerprints or signatures), civil libertarians and their allies in Congress would see much moves as steps toward a national ID card. Meanwhile, SSA is tightening its antifraud training and procedures. INS now prepares and submits directly to SSA applicants for cards for newly legalized aliens. Registrars of vital statistics in nearly half the states now obtain cards for infants at birth. Machine Readable Travel Documents Skyrocketing numbers of international travelers and growing concern for security have quickened movement toward more secure, machine-readable travel documents and identification cards. In 1987, customs and immigration officials had to inspect a staggering one-third of a billion persons entering the U.S. Machine-readable passports, visas and border crossing cards are more difficult to counterfeit or alter, allow faster but more thorough inspection of each traveler, and permit instantaneous capture of data from each document. Abuse of visas and border crossing cards has accounted for nearly 20 percent of all illegal immigration. Until now, INS ability to check alien visitors in and out of the United States and track overstayers has been limited. The latest version of INS' "green card," Form I-551 in official parlance, is partly machine-readable. However, various versions of the alien registration card issued before 1979 and still in circulation are easily counterfeited or altered. INS is moving toward a machine-readable card for all permanent resident aliens and a single tamper-proof card for all temporary residents with work authorization. Safeguarding America's Civil Documents In 1979 FACFI recommended a range of federal and state actions to protect the integrity of the birth certificate. FACFI urged uniformity of format and other characteristics, centralization of issuing authority in each state, tighter controls over certificate forms, tougher penalties for fraud, recordkeeping of requests for certificates, and more training to sensitize vital statistics personnel to fraud. Concerned over the frequency of fraudulent use of birth certificates of deceased Americans, particularly infants, FACFI called for the matching of birth and death certificates. State legislatures have considered many of these proposals since the 1970s, but change has been slow. The United States, long in the vanguard of sophisticated information technology, approaches the 21st Century with vital statistics recordkeeping not far removed from the era of the quill pen. Twelve of the fifty states—including California, with nearly half of the country's illegal alien population-persist in treating individual birth, marriage and death documents as public records. Three states continue to maintain all original records at the local level. While some twenty states at one time centralized all recording and issuance, heavy pressures from local interests in recent years have reversed this trend. One area of progress is in the matching of births and infant deaths, now a widespread practice. Some states now match all in-state birth and adult death certificates. But concern over costs and the sheer magnitude of the task has seriously slowed movement toward a comprehensive nationwide procedure for matching births and deaths. These basic gaps in the security of our national identification network can only be bridged not by advancing technology, but by political will. Technological advances are making feasible the low-cost issuance of tamperproof identification documents for citizens and legal residents such as passports and alien registration and social security cards. But those documents ultimately are only as reliable as the civil records from which they are derived. The birth record of a deceased American obtainable for a fee of five dollars or less, or purchased from a forger for a few hundred dollars, can open the door to the highly coveted entitlements and enhanced earnings that accompany American residence, which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. What Can Be Done Within Present Political Limits Eventually Congress and the nation must come to terms with the political issues blocking creation of a secure national identification system. Our complex, information-intensive society will demand it for a host of reasons that go beyond effective immigration control. Reasoned national debate will show that such a system can help protect our liberties rather than diminish them, and that the experience of Western European democracies demonstrates that free societies can enjoy the security of sound national identification systems with full safeguards against government abuse. But much can be done now to increase our protection short of creating a national identity card and central population register. The following actions would offer the best chances for positive results in the short term:
Notes Materials for this article were taken from: U.S. Congress, Senate Judiciary Committee: Hearings on False Identification Documents (No. J-97-111); Washington, June 16, 1982. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs: Hearings on Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act of 1986, 99th Congress; Washington, September 16, 1986. U.S. Congress: Congressional Record, Senate, Speech of Senator Robert Dole, October 21, 1988. General Accounting Office: "New Alien Identification Systems - Little Help in Stopping Illegal Aliens;" Report GGD-79-44 of May 30, 1979. General Accounting Office: "Immigration Control: A New Role for the Social Security Card; " Report HRD-88-4 of March, 1988. General Accounting Office: "Computer Systems: Overview of Federal Systems for Processing Aliens Seeking U.S. Entry; " Report IMTEC-88-55BR of September 1988. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Inspector General's Report on ''False Identification: The Problems and Technological Options;" December 1982. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Report to Congress of the Secretary of Health and Human Services: "A Social Security Number Validation System: Feasibility, Costs and Privacy Considerations;" December 15, 1988. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: National Center for Health Statistics: Model State Vital Statistics Act and Regulations, 1977. U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Advisory Committee on False Identification: Report on the Criminal Use of False Identification; November 1976. Interviews with officials of Departments of State, Justice, Health and Human Services and with Senate Committee Staff members; November/December 1988 and January 1989.
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