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Requiring a Federal ID to open a bank account or take a job is necessary to enforce Federal immigration law

Nonsense. Federal immigration laws have been enforced for decades without doing any such thing.

All it takes is spot-checking known suspicious employers often enough, and setting the fines high enough, so that the "expected value" (the amount of the fine multiplied by the probability of getting caught) of the penalities exceeds the savings from hiring illegal aliens instead of citizens. That's Statistics 101.

All it takes is spot-checking known suspicious employers often enough, and setting the fines high enough, so that the "expected value" (the amount of the fine multiplied by the probability of getting caught) of the penalities exceeds the savings from hiring illegal aliens instead of citizens.

If an employer is knowingly hiring Illegals, seize his assets under RICO, and use the proceeds to fund more enforcement.

All it takes is spot-checking known suspicious employers often enough, and setting the fines high enough, so that the "expected value" (the amount of the fine multiplied by the probability of getting caught) of the penalities exceeds the savings from hiring illegal aliens instead of citizens. That's Statistics 101.

Well, you'd have to do a formal analysis to know for sure, but given that illegals are practically willing to work for nothing, and that fines are bounded from above by political considerations, intuitively it seems to me that you'd have to have to spot check a very high number of establishments to bring make the expected value of hiring illegals negative. That would make it very costly. We're talking billions a year, I figure. I could be wrong, though, and if you have done the formal analysis, I'd love to see it.

You have the added problem that drivers liscences and birth certificates or social security cards are easy to forge, so even employers who are trying to comply are going to have a hard time weeding out the illegals.

My alternative would not cost very much. You'd have to spend some money to increase the number of passport offices and increase state department staff, but I figure $10-20 million would do the trick. You'd also have to merge the INS, passport, and social security databases, but that would be cheap. A couple million. With this system you'd get the added benefit of better airline security, less tax evasion, and less money laundering (if passports are required for opening bank accounts).

If it's done right, the inconvenience to citizens would be minimal. You go in person to get a passport once in your adult life (and one other time as a kid, maybe). Then you renew every ten years by mail. Or even if you had to renew in person, doing it once every ten yeras is not a big deal.