Ihre Papiere bitte!
The legislation (HR 4437, Section 707) would create a sea-change in federal employment rules by requiring all workers in the country to obtain a federal agency’s permission to work. All employers would be required to participate in a national employment eligibility verification program in an expansion of the faulty but voluntary "Basic Pilot" program in current law. Like Basic Pilot, the new program would use an Internet-based system to check the names and social security numbers of all employees -- citizens and non-citizen alike -- against a Department of Homeland Security database.
Remember the days when a social security card was most certainly not a government ID that you had to show for anything, and how once upon a time you couldn't officially use one as an ID number anywhere? Apparently this is no longer operative, and letting people get a job without having official right-to-work papers means that The Terrorists(tm) have won.
Now, having to get government permission slips to work is a long-standing tradition in many countries around the world, but the United States has not traditionally been one of those countries. What next? Will we (and by "we", I mean everyone who makes less than US$1 million a year) have to get government permission to move from state to state?
I can just smell the freedom™ rising from this bill.
(h/t to Lambert at Correntewire)
Comments
It is just another part of creeping fascism in the US. They chip away at freedom and privacy a little at a time so that most people are unaware of what is happening. And freedoms are always taken away under the pretext of protection and security... "for our own good".
Social Security numbers were supposed to be strictly limited to use by Social Security. However, try applying for a credit card or a loan without giving them your SSN. Try getting a driver license or professional license without your SSN. It has evolved into a defacto national identification number. "President" Bush is simply taking it to the next step.
And, of course, the funny thing that the whole stupid "right to work" document should be nothing other than your US citizenship or work permit. And it's already trivial for the federales to ring up the neighborhood branch of the Department of Data Mining to get verification that you're a citizen or have a work permit, so the new papers law would simple mean that the federales would stop doing the verification and would instead trust the easily forged work permit document.
The factory farms that depend on illegal migrant labour will loooove this bill all to pieces, because it makes it a lot easier for them to pretend that "well gosh, we didn't know that it wasn't real paper!" And the Al Queda black ops coordinators will cream themselves with glee, because it will make it easier to insert white-acting agents into the soft underbelly of the Great Satan™ (or whatever insulting name these Wahabhi fundamentalists use for the United States.) The only people who won't like it are American citizens who haven't yet twigged onto just what the word "coup" actually means, and, heh, they don't matter because the votes are counted by computers.
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In the early 1970s the Federal Government was busy telling people to keep their social security numbers private. They are still telling people to avoid disclosing the number. People MUST be shown the Privacy Act when anyone requests your SSN.
In the same early 1970s, the Department of Defense stopped making up service numbers for its members and started using the SSN as the service number. My ID has my name and my SSN right on the front.
Here is an interesting side note. My Navy ID is not sufficient to prove I have a SSN. If I don't have the official SSN card, I have a bit of a problem getting employed.
Yep. I've felt so much safer since they made that change all those years ago.