For all its wonders, technology is not something policymakers can sprinkle on deep-seated economic and social problems to make them go away. Electronic employment eligibility verification – the idea of automated immigration-background checks on all newly hired workers – illustrates this well.
A national EEV program would immerse America’s workers and businesses in Kafkaesque bureaucracy and erode the freedoms of the American citizen, even as it failed to stem illegal immigration.
Ultimately, there is no alternative but for Congress to repair the broken immigration system by aligning legal immigration with our nation’s economic demand for labor.
Read about it in my new paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”
A podcast on it can be found here.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.