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The Road to National ID

I’m a little pressed for time this morning, so I’ll wait until tonight to do a more indepth analysis of the President’s speech. However, there was one point that made me a little uncomfortable:

A key part of that system should be a new identification card for every legal foreign worker. This card should use biometric technology, such as digital fingerprints, to make it tamper-proof. A tamper-proof card would help us enforce the law – and leave employers with no excuse for violating it. And by making it harder for illegal immigrants to find work in our country, we would discourage people from crossing the border illegally in the first place.

At first glance that sounds like a good idea. However, let’s think this through. The only way this works is to require everyone in the country – legal and illegal – to have one of these new biometric cards, and I’m not sure I like that idea.