It was only a matter of time.

The Wall Street Journal has a big story today about Senator Schumer’s plan to create a mandatory national biometric worker identity card for all workers in the U.S. as part of his immigration reform plan.

We’ve been sounding the alarm bells on this plan for months now.

Senator Schumer believes requiring all workers—citizen and non-citizen alike—to submit their fingerprints to the government will put an end to undocumented immigration once and for all. Oh, and the privacy thing isn’t really a big deal. Riiiiight.

ACLU Legislative Counsel Chris Calabrese was quoted in the story (full story at WSJ here):

"It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people's privacy," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We're also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification."

Amen, Chris.

Check the NYCLU’s new publication, Mandatory Biometric Worker Identification Cards: A Briefer, for a fuller discussion of the potential consequences of Schumer’s plan.

Also, feel free to let Senator Schumer know how you feel about it. Again.