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Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID?
From: "Randy Abrams" <abrams () eset com>
Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 17:51:34 -0700
It's the pro-wealthy tax system that is getting rid of the middle class. The illegal immigrants are the red herring that the naive buy by the metric ton from those who wish to keep the rich rich and the misguided fighting those who are not their enemies. Not saying to ignore immigration laws, but focus on the significant problems, not the fish sandwiches you've been gnawing on. Cheers, Randy ________________________________ From: C Q [mailto:kyle.c.quest () gmail com] Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 5:38 PM To: Alex Eckelberry Cc: Randy Abrams; privacy () whitestar linuxbox org Subject: Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? There are two issues here: 1. National ID and its benefits 2. Illegal aliens and their impact on the lives of the people who live in the US. I got distracted a bit with issue number even though it's not about the National ID itself. However, it is a very very very serious problem... more than you may realize. The illegal aliens are not keeping this country going... They have the opposite long term effect. They are destroying this country and destroying the middle class and the hopes and the opportunities for the the US citizens. It's important to make a distinction between immigrants, people who come here legally, and illegal aliens. America needs immigrants. They provide fresh sources of brain power and fresh sources of man power. Immigrants and their drive the achieve their dreams is what made this country great. When it comes to illegal aliens there are a number of negative side effects... both short term and long term. Once of the short term side effects is the stagnating wages in the very industries where some businesses and defenders of the illegals claim that we don't have enough people to do the job and where Americans don't want to do the job. In the construction, service, and agriculture the wages have stayed the same or even declined over the last 20 years (taking into the consideration the inflation and other factors). The basic rules of economics indicate that when there's short supply the demand results in increased prices and in this case it should have resulted in the increased wages; however, the effect is the opposite. As for the claim that americans don't want these jobs... these are a lot of times simply lies or a result and unwilliness to search for workers. Take the recent raid here in MA in New Bedford where a whole bunch of illegals were arrested... The funny thing is that pretty much the next day those jobs were filled... and they were filled with US citizens. So much for americans not wanting those jobs. The real problem is that the employers just don't want to pay for the job. They want to exploit the cheap labor and the illegals are willing to put up with that. This is the new age slavery. Speaking of slavery... What is slavery... Slavery is cheap labor. Now let's go back in time when we were using slave to do a lot of work. I'm pretty sure that in that age there were a lot of people who didn't want to get rid of slavery because they didn't want to loose cheap labor. Slaves were "keeping this country going economically". Sounds familiar? Yes, this is what you are saying about the illegals. Now let me ask you a question... Did the US survive after getting read of slavery? No! And if we survived getting rid of the ultimate source of cheap labor, slaves, we will definitely do find without having to use illegal aliens. Now let's talk about why Americans don't take a lot of those jobs... The main reason is that you can not survive on that kind of money if you live here legally!!! It's that simple... I recommend all of you to watch one of the episodes of "30 days" made by Morgan Spurlock. This is the guy who made "Supersize Me". He had a series on Fox where he explored various topics for 30 days. One of those topics was, "Is it possible to live on the minimal wage". He and his girlfriend lived got minimal wage jobs and tried to live on that for 30 days. The results of this documentary will tell you a lot... They barely managed to survive.. The bottom line if you live here by the law doing everything you are suppose to... paying all of the official expenses... you are on the edge of existence. You may ask, "well, then how do illegal aliens manage to survive on so little money"? The answer is very simple. They do it because of subhuman living conditions and not having to pay for a lot of things US citizens and permanent residents have to pay. It's not uncommon for illegals to be stuffed like sardines on top of each other in a 3 bedroom house. As a result, each of them probably ends up paying at most $100 a month for rent. Now let me ask you... How much would it take if you want to get an apartment or a house? Well, here in MA it's not uncommon to pay $1200 a month. Now let's compare... $100 an illegal spends on rent living in subhuman conditions and $1200 a citizen spends on average rent. Tell me how can I afford to work the job this illegal has if only in rent I need to pay 12 times more than he does? Good question... isn't it... Let's now forget that we have a huge number of legal immigrants coming to this country each year. At one point in my life I actually worked for a government agency that deal with new immigrants (i'm talking about legal immigrants). And I can tell you on my own experience that those people were willing to do any job, but it actually took a while to get jobs for some. And why... because some shady employers would rather hire an illegal for half the price rather then hire a legal immigrant who just came to this country. Kinda ironic... isn't it. All this screaming about not having enough people to do the jobs, but for some reasons the legal immigrants who are ready and willing to work can't find jobs. As for national IDs. They are good for properly identifying who you are dealing with. National IDs will result in reduced identity theft, which is actually more relevant to this mailing list. The last time I checked... identity theft was bad :-) On 5/18/07, Alex Eckelberry <AlexE () sunbelt-software com > wrote: I can't actually understand, even after looking through your post, why it's _good_ to have a national ID card. All I can see is an inevitable _bad_ that comes out of it. Incidentally, "illegal aliens" are the very people who are actually keeping this country going economically. Perhaps we could have a national ID card just for those American citizens who want to pick strawberries and wash dishes. That would greatly limit the amount of cards issued and we'd all be happy. Alex Eckelberry ________________________________ From: Randy Abrams [mailto:abrams () eset com] Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 4:28 PM To: C Q; privacy () whitestar linuxbox org Subject: Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? pass the Kool-Aid please ________________________________ From: C Q [mailto:kyle.c.quest () gmail com] Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 10:56 PM To: privacy () whitestar linuxbox org Subject: Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? It's a great idea to have a national id that's hard to forge... and even if not every place has a biometric card reader if the card is properly designed you'll be able to spot a fake (e.g., think special paper we use for money... with water marks and metal strips. and even though the money is far from perfect it's relatively easy to spot a fake by touch and by simply looking at them). This way even the farmers or whoever who don't have computers will be able to check the legality of their workers. Illegal aliens are one of the major problems in the US (we are not unique... any western country suffers from it... UK, France, etc... and even Mexico, which is kinda funny considering that they are also trying to get rid of illegal aliens from their southern borders). Yes, it's true that not everybody who want to come to the states and work can do that, but it's not because there's no legal way... it's because there are literally hundreds of millions of people who live in bad conditions. It's physically impossible take them all in... the country will simply fall apart. It's like a case when you have ship sinking and there's enough life boats only for a few people... if everybody tries to get on those few boats the boats will sink and everybody will drown. The US can not save everybody less fortunate in the world. We do take more legal immigrants every year than any other country in the world (I forgot the exact numbers, but I seem to remember it's about 3 million people) and on top of that we have a number of "guest worker" programs. H1B is one of them, but there are a number of others as well, which is teens from South Africa end up working as sky instructors during winters and kids from Scotland and Russia end up working in movie theaters during summers here in New England. The funny thing is that unlike UK or Australia (I might be a bit off on the names of the countries a bit... getting late) who use a point based system to determine who should get in their country our process is random, so we don't really get the best and the brightest. It's important to have a tamper-proof id that verifies a person's identity and his/her national status. It's the least we can do and I personally don't see a big deal why people are so scared of this. Other countries have internal passports as mandatory national IDs... and nothing terrible happens to people there. We have technology to do this and it doesn't have to be too high tech. On 5/17/07, Fergie <fergdawg () netzero net> wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Via Homeland Stupidity. [snip] Two proposals being floated around Capitol Hill call for the Social Security card to be updated with biometric information and for U.S. employers to be required to verify it with the Department of Homeland Security when hiring. Scared yet? You should be. While everyone was off fighting the REAL ID battle, national identification proponents were sneaking in the back door, arguing that the Social Security card should be updated with the latest technology to prevent illegal immigrants from working. Under the so-called Bonner Plan, citizens and resident aliens alike would have to obtain a new Social Security card containing their photograph, a barcode or magnetic stripe containing an encrypted signature verifiable through card readers provided by the Department of Homeland Security, and would have to present this card in order to obtain work. The plan provides that employers who fail to verify the card face fines, prison time, and would be billed for the cost of deporting any illegal aliens they may have hired. Of course, they're still claiming that the card wouldn't be a national ID card. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it certainly isn't a sheep. [snip] More: http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2007/05/16/social-security-card-to-be-na tio nal-id/ - - ferg -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Desktop 9.6.1 (Build 1012) wj8DBQFGS9vUq1pz9mNUZTMRAtEVAKC7v/r/0vx5bTAiH6blwMO6iTCAcQCgyA8K rzCOsuTMsatnP00Ik8Y1Gto= =54Kc -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg(at)netzero.net ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ privacy mailing list privacy () whitestar linuxbox org http://www.whitestar.linuxbox.org/mailman/listinfo/privacy ...
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Current thread:
- [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Fergie (May 16)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? C Q (May 16)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Randy Abrams (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Alex Eckelberry (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? C Q (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? C Q (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Randy Abrams (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? C Q (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Randy Abrams (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? C Q (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Randy Abrams (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? C Q (May 16)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Valdis . Kletnieks (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? C Q (May 18)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Brian Loe (May 21)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Alex Eckelberry (May 21)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Brian Loe (May 21)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Valdis . Kletnieks (May 21)
- Re: [privacy] Social Security Card to be National ID? Brian Loe (May 21)