An ID-Card Plan That Makes Sense : Easier way for employers to verify worker status

One big reason political debate about illegal immigration tends to generate so much heat and not enough light is because it is too often focused on the wrong issues.

Politicians who should know better argue over marginal, but highly emotional, questions like whether or not immigrants abuse the welfare system while either downplaying, or just plain ignoring, the true magnet that draws most illegal immigrants to this country: Jobs.

Of course, the jobs issue was supposed to have been abated with enactment of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. This watershed measure made it illegal for U.S. employers to hire illegal immigrants. But so many illegal immigrants still find work that it’s obvious many employers either can’t find an effective way to comply with IRCA or, worse yet, are ignoring it.

Fortunately, a Washington panel has come up with a constructive proposal to fine-tune that landmark 1986 law. The chairwoman of the little-known but potentially important U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, former Rep. Barbara Jordan, this week urged Congress to establish a simple but elegant experimental program to help employers verify whether newly hired workers are in this country legally.

That would be done not by creating some massive new government program, with an inevitable new bureaucracy, but by setting up a database of Social Security numbers. Jordan proposes that a pilot program be set up in five states, including California, to find the best ways to use the database to verify a world-be workers’ identity and legality.

That is an excellent idea--one that this newspaper has long favored as a reasonable way to make IRCA work without discriminating against minorities or unduly invading the privacy of U.S. citizens. After all, every legal U.S. worker already has a Social Security number that must be given to an employer when applying for a job. An accurate database would add only one more step--most likely a quick telephone call or computer check--to the hiring process. That should not be a burden for either employers or legal workers.

Congress should move quickly to enact Jordan’s proposal when it is formally transmitted next month as part of a report to Congress prepared by the bipartisan commission she chairs. And we fervently hope that the other recommendations the nine-member body makes will be just as constructive. The commission is fortunate to include among its members knowledgeable people on immigration. And in Jordan it has a chairwoman who is respected on Capitol Hill. During her tenure as a Democratic representative from Texas, Jordan was admired for a balanced and reasoned approach to the most complex public-policy issues. Those are precisely the qualities that can help cool the overheated immigration debate.