The NYT reports that Senators trying to hash out a bipartisan immigration bill have rejected using biometric ID cards to identify legal workers:
The bipartisan group of eight senators is also still debating how to improve E-Verify, the system that employers use to check the immigration status of their workers. A high-tech, biometric identification card was deemed too costly; instead, the group is considering an enhanced E-Verify system that would allow employers to use photographs to identify job applicants and would let workers provide answers to security questions to help prove their legal work status.
I’d like to think that the report Jonathan Weinberg and I wrote last year, Hard to BELIEVE: The High Cost of a Biometric Identity Card (Feb. 2012), published by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law & Social Policy at UC Berkeley School of Law, had something to do with this.
