The Cato Institute is seeking a “researcher to support a campaign to educate the public and policymakers on the implications of biometric identification systems related to immigration policy reforms.

The better applicants will know how many different governmental systems work—legislation, appropriation, regulation, procurement, grant-making, and so on—and have zeal to chase down all the ways the national ID builders are using them to advance their cause.

Immigration reform legislation in the Senate that features a vast expansion of E-Verify is yet another reason to join the fight against having a national ID in the United States.

My March 2008 paper, Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration, detailed the problems with electronic employment verification systems. The paper concludes that successful “internal enforcement” of immigration law requires a national ID—and ultimately a cradle-to-grave biometric tracking system.

The Department of Homeland Security has started a program called the “I E-Verify” campaign for businesses that use the federal background check system on its employees. If you see businesses with “I E-Verify” decorations or insignia, they at least indirectly support a national ID system in the United States. This can help you decide whether or not you want to spend your dollars with them.

I’m pleased and humbled to have been named one of the Ars Technica/Tech Policy Central “People to Watch” in 2009. Along with my opposition to the REAL ID national identification scheme, they cite my work opposing the E-Verify national worker background check system (which would ultimately require a national ID).

Considering how the economic stimulus bill may be a vehicle for mandating broader use of E-Verify, the first thing you might see from watching me in 2009 might be an angry and disappointed advocate for liberty.

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is delaying the Bush Administration plan to require federal contractors to use the E-Verify worker background check system.

Criticizing the move, Lamar Smith (R-TX), ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee says, “It is ironic that at the same time President Obama was pushing for passage of the stimulus package to help the unemployed, his Administration delayed implementation of a rule designed to protect jobs for U.S. citizens and legal workers.”

E-Verify may well have been designed or intended to protect jobs for citizens and legal workers, but that’s not at all what it would do. I wrote about it in a Cato Policy Analysis titled “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration” (a ten-year follow-on to Stephen Moore’s “A National Id System: Big Brother’s Solution to Illegal Immigration“):

A mandatory national EEV system would have substantial costs yet still fail to prevent illegal immigration. It would deny a sizable percentage of law-abiding American citizens the ability to work legally. Deemed ineligible by a database, millions each year would go pleading to the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration for the right to work.

Even if E-Verify were workable, mission creep would lead to its use for direct federal control of many aspects of American citizens’ lives. Though it should be scrapped, the longer E-Verify is delayed the better.

The 111th Congress and the new Obama administration should scrap “E-Verify.” The federal government’s inchoate immigration background check system is the culmination of 20 years’ failure to create a tolerable “internal enforcement” program for U.S. immigration law. Rather than building on past failure, the new Congress and president should pull the plug on E-Verify and reform immigration law so that it aligns with the nation’s economic need for labor.

More here.