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I felt kind of annoyed by the claim that "most" Supreme Court cases go 6-3 along ideological lines, although I guess the more defensible version would be that the controversial cases all go 6-3 along ideological lines. Be that as it may, I created a website this morning to help understand data from the most recent term. Spent more time than I intended on this so I'm hoping someone else finds it interesting: https://wbruntra.github.io/scotus/?tab=dashboard
A lot of noise, at least on Twitter, is being made about the birthright citizenship case, but the more meaningful victories for Reds are the porn and LGBT school lessons cases.
The real blackpill for hardcore immigration restrictionists is even if birthright citizenship is overturned for illegals, there won't be significant decrease in either the immigrant population or immigration inflow for two reasons:
Deportations numbers are nowhere near where they need to be in order for millions of people to be removed within the next four years, and it's only going to get tougher as attention is peeled off to other matters, political capital is expended on other issues, and exceptions are made.
The Trump administration has not indicated that they are going to pursue any meaningful changes to either family-based or employment visas, which combined, account for approximately 80% of how people acquire permanent residency. Immigration via refugee resettlement and other humanitarian programs are a small proportion of the increase in the immigrant population since 1965. Trump himself has historically been a pro-immigration guy, and his recent comments on DACA, H1-Bs, and Chinese students, combined with his willingness to compromise on which illegal immigrants are prioritized for deportation, suggest that millions of people will continue to acquire permanent residency and citizenship.
In my opinion the true blackpill for the anti-immigration hardliners is the bipartisan refusal by the government to actually enforce E-Verify, which quite literally is already on the books (relatedly the floated exception for illegal immigrants employed in agriculture and hospitality). A crackdown on illegal immigration which refuses to penalize employers for hiring illegal immigrants is a completely unserious attempt at a crackdown. The administration seems to be optimizing for flashy headline-grabbing deportation raids while avoiding anything that might actually disrupt the status quo.
The CEO of Glenn Valley Foods was shocked to find ICE carting away a dozen of his workers even though he participated fully in E-Verify.
From the point of view of an employer, I dunno what to tell him. If we want employers to be part of an enforcement system, we need to have some assurance that if they do the work, it will actually result in not hiring ineligible workers. This is a guy that provides significant training and value to employees -- the exact kind of person we want to incentivize to hire legals. Instead he's going back and using the same E-Verify system that sucks in the first place.
It seems like "e-verify" is just filing a simplified form I-9 (which has a field for social security number/A-number/passport number) online, and then getting a result saying that "records match" from the SSA or DHS. On Form I-9, the employee attests under penalty of perjury that they have the right to work until some date, and provides IDs to back up that claim. The employer attests under penalty of perjury that they have verified the worker's official documents which establish identity and employment authorization. This is already required for all employers. I imagine a ton of employers are not actually verifying documents and perjuring themselves, but nobody cares, because it is employers who sponsor political candidates.
According to USCIS, E-verify is different from Form I-9 in that it requires a social security number and photo identity documents, and tells the employer whether the employee is eligible to work within three to five seconds. Watching one of their tutorials for employers, the employer fills out "Name", "Date of Birth", "Social Security Number", "Employee's email address", "Citizenship status", and which documents the employee provided. (With the exception of the email address, this all duplicates information on the I-9). The employer is then prompted to upload scans of the documents provided.
So how does the program not work? How does an employer who uses it end up hiring ineligible workers? News outlets are saying that the Glenn Valley Foods CEO "explained that federal officials said his company was a victim of unauthorized workers using stolen identities or fake IDs to get around the E-Verify system."
We have a couple options here. None of them leave the employer, the immigrant, or DHS/SSA/USCIS looking very good:
Employees were signing up to work with scans of other people's documents. Literal identity theft, and the employer didn't catch it because they aren't actually comparing the photo on the ID to the physical person at the worksite (as they are testifying they did under penalty of perjury). This probably shows up as tax fraud later, too.
It's all a performative show. There is no photo recognition on the back end, or USCIS is failing to actually assess eligibility to work. Perhaps people on refugee status with scheduled court dates are automatically waived through. This one is on the US government.
"Photo ID" is not what you think. Form I-9 instructions and E-verify instructions both link a list of "Documents that establish identity," List B from Form I-9. These include a "school ID card with photograph" or, for minors, a "school record or report card". I can't imagine that a "school ID" is a challenging document to fake, given the number and variety of schools of higher education (includes tech schools!) around the country and how there are no standards for what constitutes a school ID. (Not to mention the number of minors who are able to buy alcohol in the US.) I also can't imagine a "report card" incorporating a photo ID, and again, they are printed by every school in the nation, and nowadays report cards are probably html files which can be modified by anyone with technical savvy before being printed off at home. So potentially all that an immigrant has to do is claim to be an under-18 refugee or college student, provide a fake ID or report card, and they can pass document inspections at a lower level of scrutiny. Again, literal identity theft, with the US government complicit. The employer must be wondering how 30% of their balding day laborers are children and students.
I think it is likely that the answer is (2). The reason this business was raided was because DHS already knew there were a bunch of people working there who didn't have the right to work. Perhaps they were previously permitted to work, and perhaps the Biden admin was letting anyone work.
In summary, I am appalled by the low standards of quality the US holds itself to for ID verification (one can also use a student ID to vote!), and I think it's possible anyone involved - immigrant, employer, or government - could be telling "motivated truths".
Fully agree with all this, except I'd kinda put more (relative) on 1/3. In particular, there's studies that untrained individuals are not great at matching photos to people, especially grainy ones and many of them were using stolen identities of people vaguely co-ethnic to them.
Another take on the conclusion is that there is no actual system in place for verifying someone's identity in a way that works when applied by clueless or look-the-other-way very-mildly-complicit employers.
One of my coworkers suggested the simplest way would be that when you start work and do the I9 process, the government goes back and verifies with you via an independent means.
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As someone out of US trying to understand why is it that difficult to implement a work right verification system when every other developed country have one:
Isn't this the standard for everyother first world countries?
The US has long been a little weird about ID.
The right was always worried about a communist takeover of the federal government and wanted to make sure they could disappear and live under fake names without too much skill needed. I'm using communist loosely, there are a lot of possible left authoritarian governments that people on the right would feel the need to hide from.
The left really did have a bunch of radicals living under fake names. Some for longer than you'd think -- Sara Jane Olson of the Symbionese Liberation Army wasn't caught until 1999.
After 2001 there was a lot of interest in tightening things up, but by that point there were a lot of illegal immigrants, and neither party really wanted to shake things up too much.
So the US government is a lot worse at identifying individuals than you'd expect. Systems are designed not to work with each other or report obvious problems. The IRS goes as far as setting up their computer systems to allow for people filing taxes with stolen SSNs.
I don't know specifics about e-verify, but I've heard it was mostly designed around making congress look like it's doing something.
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I think the problem, as usual, is diversity; the US has a large ethnic underclass that thinks it's fucking normal to go around without an ID, and has no idea where their birth certificate is, if it even still exists. You can't enforce "papers, please!" on illegal Hispanic without enforcing it on urban blacks, and they would fail just as often despite having every legal right to live and work here, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth; see the kerfuffle about needing an ID to vote.
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One faction (my faction, I suppose to acknowledge my obvious bias) of the anti-immigration camp is that while the {parole-in-place, resettlement, credible-fear and temporary protected status, etc...} are a small proportion of numbers but a huge proportion of problematic and highly net-negative immigrants as compared to the Sergeys and Elons of the world. You could call them selectivists but really it's absurd to thing that we even need to characterized "we don't need 100K Haitians" as selectivity.
I expect that when the anti-immigration camp was totally out of the zeitgeist in the preceding decade they didn't have to reconcile what they really meant because there was a strong external enemy and they were out of power anyway. Now the farmworker thing has crystalized the division and someone is going to have to mediate it.
It was easy to be against the Obama/Biden policies, it's harder to find one that satisfies the entire coalition.
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