A system fighting itself over IDs

An article about E-Verify, the federal program to verify that job candidates are not here illegally. Spoiler alert — it doesn't work very well, and anti-discrimination policies make it worse. I despise government for its incompetency, but this level of left hand fighting the right hand surprised me.

"It would be hard to design a more ineffective system than E-Verify," said Alex Nowrasteh, a director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington. "The system only checks the documents that you give it. It doesn't check the worker. That's the fatal flaw."

The funny part is that even when the employer thinks the documents are fake, they don't dare ask for other documentation.

The problem, he said, is not just that the system fails to detect fraud, but that there's also a tension between immigration laws on verifying employment eligibility and federal laws on national origin discrimination.

"If we request more documents than we're supposed to or refuse to hire a worker on the basis that the worker comes from another country, we're at liability of the over-documentation clause that is part of federal discrimination law," Gilliland said. "We can't do that. We have to make a judgment call, and the judgment call is the E-Verify system."

There's also the problem of detecting fake documentation.

In addition to using E-Verify, the company conducts regular audits to make sure their workforce is clear of unauthorized workers and requires hiring managers to complete a four-hour training session on how to spot fraudulent documents with magnifying glasses and backlighting.

Experts said the system could be improved by including more biometric information, such as facial photographs and fingerprints. But that would probably require the creation of a national registry like those long used in much of Europe.

Every U.S. citizen and legal resident in the United States would have to sign up and be issued a national identity card — a move that would be costly and almost certainly face fierce opposition from a range of groups concerned with privacy and civil liberties.

Chartertopia obviously can't have national ID cards like this, since it has no employees, budgets, etc, and requiring everyone to carry an ID with them, and show it on demand, is a clear violation of self-control.

There are two areas where checking ID is used in most countries, but not used by the Chartertopia government: immigration and voting.

Border control is handled entirely by the people who own border parcels. Stopping only immigrants, while passing returning natives and foreign tourists and business travel, runs the risk of perjury for blocking real natives. The border is also leaky; if one entry point rejects someone, there are others; the US southern and northern borders are long and have lots of mountains, deserts, and farms; and the coasts are long. Someone who is bound and determined can almost certainly enter.

The Chartertopia government can't entice immigrants with welfare, free food, lodging, and cash; it doesn't have occupational licensing, minimum wage laws, or expensive minimum housing standards which make it so hard to be self-supporting while adapting; and it isn't flying in hundreds of thousands of refugees who know nothing of where they are going, don't like the culture or weather when they arrive, aren't allowed to work, and end up just causing trouble for everybody. Charities depend on donations, and if too many criminals and troublemakers are traced back to particular charities, their donations will dry up. If charities or businesses falsely certify immigrants as to their criminal record, language and work skills, or other matters which people depend on, that is perjury.

Everybody who wants to move to Chartertopia is entirely on their own. If they don't have family or friends there already, or can't find a charity to help them, if they don't speak the language, if they can't stand the culture or weather, they won't come, or they will change their minds and leave. Criminals and gangs who think Chartertopia is easy pickings will find there are no illegal jobs (drugs, prostitution, gambling) to get rich from, that the communities they choose to prey on know about self-defense and redress, that there are no government cops to bribe, and will have flagged themselves as flight risks and dangerous enough to be locked up in a nasty cheap prison, begging to be deported. Immigration to Chartertopia is like it was in the US before 1914 and WW I.

Voting in Chartertopia is unlike any country I know of; here (Substack 20240802-39) is a series of posts if you want the gory details. What matters here is that the only requirements are that you be present (no early or absentee voting, or by internet, mail, phone, or otherwise remotely) so that everybody there can size you up as a "competent adult". No children; if you look young, people may ask questions such as do you have a job, live with your parents, etc. If you are old enough, and ask a lot of silly questions as if it is your first time, people may ask questions to make sure you understand the charter at least. If you don't speak the language well, people may ask questions to make sure you understand the ballot and its current issues.

What it comes down to is that "competence": can you exercise your self-control duty to take care of yourself? Are you an escaped nutter, dim-witted, senile, or an outsider who knows nothing of the charter or the current ballot issues? A voting precinct always has a few people present even if there are no other voters waiting at the moment: precinct workers, watchdogs counting voters, friends and family who don't intend to vote or already have. If one of them asks a question or two, the others will pay attention, and if a quick crowd consensus develops and the voter votes or leaves, that's the end of it. If the voter or someone wants to buck the consensus, they can file a complaint for perjury, call for a redress agent, turn it into an official case, and it will probably all be over in a few minutes. It won't be expensive; the issue at stake is the voting fee, the agent's fee, the redress fee, and that's about it.

It's open to abuse. The precinct may be in a neighborhood of bigots, there may be a long line of voters who don't like the current voter slowing them down with a lot of tom-fool questions, the voter may have just moved into the neighborhood and no one knows him. But there are always other polling stations, or rejected voters can come back when it's not so crowded.

As for no qualifications other than "being present" ... if you live, work, shop, and play in different districts, why shouldn't you be able to vote there? Even tourists, yes, even foreign tourists; if they come back every year, they have some interest in the area, and if they schedule their vacations around elections and pay the extra voting fees, they are at least more serious than the entitled ones who move to an area and immediately want to vote and change things (voters get a ballot receipt, and their votes don't count unless they show a previous ballot receipt for the same district.) So one-time tourists pay the fee for nothing except a souvenir. It's hard to think of a more distinct tourist souvenir than a ballot receipt, and because elections end in voting companies publishing all those ballot receipts, those tourists can prove to their friends back home that they actually did vote in Chartertopia. If some foreigner is willing to spend all that money coming back next year to vote for real, well, there sure won't be very many of them, and is screening them out worth spending billions of dollars and slowing down elections?