Jonah: A few years back, Stephen Moore and I wrote a paper for the Cato Institute on national identification. We coughed up every argument against it we could think of. One of the most compelling, I thought, was the fact that a robust system of worker verification would force employers to seek the federal government’s permission every time they wanted to hire somebody. Moreover, even if the error rates that routinely turn up in government databases were kept to a minimum, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be denied jobs to which they are otherwise entitled. Finally, the employers who are mostly likely to hire illegal aliens would simply ignore the system anyway. It just wouldn’t work. The whole report can be read here.