Finally, there is the Social Security Protection Act, which seeks to replace the paper Social Security card with a "counterfeit-proof" version of the card for all 280 million Americans, and which was also debated in the House in May. Proposed by U.S. Rep. David Dreier (R-Los Angeles), the bill suggests the Department of Homeland Security compile a Social Security database that every employer in the country would be required to access before hiring.
To its credit, the act would take away the loophole in the 1986 law that excuses employers from verifying the immigration status of people to be hired, but at a significant cost. While Congressman Dreier's office refused to comment on the potential tab for updating the Social Security card for all 280 million Americans, the spokesperson for the Social Security Administration said that a new, technologically updated version of the card would cost from $3.9 billion to a little more than $9.2 billion, depending on which technological features are included.
Fake Social Security cards, like this one, cost $40 to
$50 in the Mission.
The corner of Mission and 24th streets has long been
known as a document counterfeiting hot spot.
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According to information made public by the Social Security Administration, the new cards would likely be made out of plastic or polyester and would include the holder's photograph, fingerprints, and other "biometric data," including voice patterns and retinal scans. The card could also contain the holder's employment history and other basic information known to the federal government, such as home address and telephone numbers, and be accessed from a distance via Radio Frequency Identification technology.
Neither Dreier's office nor the Social Security Administration would comment on what technologies were being considered for the congressman's bill, HR 98, so named, Dreier says, "because it will reduce illegal immigration by 98 percent."
The new round of terrorism-inspired immigration reform has already sparked skirmishing by interest groups, ahead of almost certain political warfare in the coming congressional elections and the 2008 presidential race.
"This [REAL ID Act] is thinly veiled as an anti-terror law; it is really an anti-immigrant law," says Margaret Zaknoen of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, a left-leaning group.
Meanwhile, Oltman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which generally skews to the conservative end of the spectrum, notes that the Senate passed REAL ID 100-0. "People want to put an end to illegal immigration, but we've seen that many of our politicians do not," Oltman says. "This was a good first step."
If the CLEAR Act becomes law, some police groups contend they will lose sources within immigrant communities, reducing their ability to fight crime. If police departments do not comply with the CLEAR Act, they stand to lose federal funding for city law enforcement. San Francisco, Boston, and a host of other cities have opposed the act, but the financial penalties may leave them little choice but to enforce immigration law. "This one is more outrageous than REAL ID," says Mark Silverman of the Bay Area Immigrant Legal Resource Center. "This would be a disaster for fighting crime."
It would probably not, however, be a disaster for Guillermo and his document-counterfeiting brethren.
For all the tough-on-illegal-immigration talk around Capitol Hill lately, immigration reform inspired by fear of terrorism does not guarantee better laws, more effective law enforcement, or the end to identification counterfeiting. In fact, just the opposite may be true.
Because technology changes quickly, experts say, no government document -- not even money -- has ever proved to be permanently unfakeable. A high-tech Social Security card might put Guillermo out of business, but that doesn't mean it could not be counterfeited, perhaps by people far more deadly than Guillermo and his street-corner salesmen. Diana Lopez and Anabel Medina don't have thousands of dollars to give to a computer hacker who could duplicate a card that features voice recognition and retinal data; al Qaeda, however, may.
The Democrat-controlled California Legislature is already preparing countermeasures that would combat much of the identity-security and entry-control legislation being considered in the Republican-controlled Congress.
Through it all, Guillermo rests easy. "I don't think nothing will change, because all of the people in power here, they say to the people now that we are bad, like terrorists," he says with a smile and a shrug. "But those same people always have illegals working for them."
Editor's note:The last names of several people in this story were withheld, at their request, because of fear of law enforcement.
