The NY Times has a sorrowful tale about how a crackdown on Social Security information — SSA contacting employers when the names and numbers they provide don’t match what the SSA has — is (gasp!) harming illegal workers.
“It’s devastating,” said Laura Reiff, an immigration lawyer in Tysons Corner. One of her clients, a New York bakery, recently lost 200 employees, nearly half its staff, after getting a letter about their Social Security numbers. “You’ve got people fleeing. You’ve got people who have to be terminated,” Reiff said.
I think our immigration policy is nuts, sometimes, but, frankly, this isn’t about immigration. Social Security records need to be accurate (I mean, damn, it’s about as close to a National ID number as we have), and if trying to clean up those records means that folks here in this country illegally have a hard time, I’m not that much in tears here.
In some ways, this may actually benefit pro-immigration/pro-amnesty folks, since this points out the large number of illegals that are a paying part of the economy.
If this is a problem, we should rationalize our immigration policy. We should not allow “bad data” in the system instead. Call me a DBA, but that’s how it is.