IMMIGRATION JUJITSU. The estimable Mark Kleiman and the smelly Lizardbreath have both come up with a fairly elegant solution to illegal immigration: offer green cards to undocumented immigrants who turn their employers in. Long-term, you'd probably just see employers insisting on enough false identification to protect their plausible deniability, but the better documentation employers demand, the fewer illegal immigrants who'll be able to afford it, and so the fewer businesses will hire. So maybe it is a good idea. In any case, I've never really been convinced by the arguments against a national ID card, and maybe one of those, with a functional central registry, could actually make a program like this workable. I'd sure love to see the business community try and argue against it...
--Ezra Klein
