Peter Pander

In a new op-ed on his congressional web site dated 11/24/2007 (a week from this coming Saturday), Peter Roskam trumpets that “The time for mandatory employee verification is now.” That left me scratching my head for a minute but I have since regained my composure.

Roskam, reaching for votes from the xenophobic right while trying to scare the rest of us into supporting a bad law, goes on to conflate the issues of undocumented immigration and airport security, and, if that wasn’t enough, to blame the failures of George Bush’s incompetent Department of Homeland Security on Governor Blagojevich.

That the Bush Administration can’t get airport security (or much of anything else) right is no excuse to victimize thousands of ordinary workers, documented and undocumented alike, who just want to provide for their families.

E-Verify doesn’t work. As many as one in ten “ineligibles” will be a false-positive, potential denying a United States citizen the right to work. And even if it did work, its blanket application would be just plain mean-spirited. There are higher laws than the immigration code to which we must answer.