COLUMBIA, S.C. - U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said Tuesday he will introduce legislation to replace all paper Social Security cards with plastic biometric cards that can't be duplicated, so employers can be certain of the legal status of their workers.
The South Carolina Republican said Congress must address the out-of-control illegal immigration problem, and last month's defeat of comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate means the problem must be tackled piecemeal.
"The root cause, the basic problem with immigration is employment," Graham said. "The reason people come here in such large numbers is to get the jobs in America that pay more in one day they can make maybe in six months where they come from."
America needs a legal guest worker program to fill jobs citizens don't want, but the U.S. must control who enters the country for national security, he said.
Employers need a system they can rely on to determine the legal status of potential workers, so Graham said he plans to introduce a bill this fall to replace all Social Security cards over the next 10 years at a cost of $8 billion to $10 billion. The new cards would be tamperproof.
"The documents used to get a job in America, a Social Security card, is a piece of paper that's easily, fraudulently duplicated," Graham said at the University of South Carolina, where he demonstrated a program employers can use to check the legal status of workers along with Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff.
Until all Americans have a secure form of identification, the best worker identification tool is a voluntary federal program used by 19,000 employers so far, Chertoff said. The computerized system verifies that the name, age, and Social Security workers give to employers match, he said.
Chertoff acknowledged the system, which would have been mandatory under the comprehensive immigration reform, has flaws. Though it will catch workers who supply fake Social Security numbers, it won't catch those who use stolen identities, he said.
Adding photo verification to the system will help. That has already started for people who hold green cards, Chertoff said.
Graham said he understands state lawmakers opposition to the federal 2005 REAL ID Act. South Carolina is among states that rejected the unfunded federal mandate for new national driver's license standards, estimated to cost states $11 billion to implement."A driver's license is not the way to solve the problem," he said.
Other complaints about REAL ID requirements were that some people, especially older residents, may not have original birth certificates to verify who they are. Graham said his legislation would allow for other forms of verification.
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