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A new report out from the libertarian Cato Institute explains how state efforts to keep illegal immigrants out of the workforce is threatening American privacy.

Despite Americans’ unwillingness to go along with a national ID scheme, Cato reports that E-Verify, which is used to check immigration status for employment and Real ID, which requires states to share drivers license information, are working together to create a de-facto national ID.

From the report:

All states collect data about their residents so they can license drivers. State databases contain photographs and vital information about drivers, such as age, birthdate, Social Security number, physical descriptors, home

address, and so on. Far too many states are beginning to comply with the federal REAL ID Act, which will require them to share this information across a nationwide network. In effect, adopting REAL ID will create a unified, nationwide database of drivers’ information. To facilitate this sharing, REAL ID–compliant states are expected to adopt uniform standards for collection and storage of driver information and display of driver data on the license in a standard machine readable zone. That oblique language in the REAL ID law refers to the barcodes now seen on many licenses. But in the future, it could be any technology, including radio frequency identification. Until recently, several states

consistently rejected the adoption of REAL ID standards, thwarting proponents’ goals in the near term. But every state is now complying in some degree with the DHS’s REAL ID mandates. A parallel development is EVerify, thenational employment verification system. E-Verify’s design and goals are simple. It is meant to allow employers to run the name and Social Security number of new hires through a system run jointly by the Social Security Administration and DHS, receiving confirmation or nonconfirmation of the employee’s work eligibility. Essentially, E-Verify is meant to let an employer know if the employee is in

the United States legally and if said employee is able to work legally, with the goal of turning off the “jobs magnet” and ending the employment of unauthorized workers in the country. E-Verify does not deliver the easy immigration-control results it promises. The program is inaccurate, frequently returning false results on American citizens/permanent residents and unauthorized workers alike. The system requires the former to prove their legal status, while the latter are erroneously judged to be work-authorized. E-Verify is a threat to basic liberties, as it may trap ordinary Americans in a Kafkaesque predicament where their employment and livelihood are denied unless they prove to federal bureaucrats that they are who they say they are— without the benefit of the state-issued driver’s license or ID that nearly everyone relies on.

As Reason’s Alec Ward points out, this is simply National ID by another name.

“This de facto National I.D. becomes even more expansive when combined with a number of new technologies that states are starting to roll out. Harper discusses the possible combinations of REAL ID and E-Verify with the facial and license plate recognition technologies many states are already using, either in experimental or full-fledged forms,” he writes.