Will the “Real” Jesus Garcia Please Stand Up?

Bill Hing reported last week on the immigration raid at the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plant.  The Dallas Morning News reports that, as it turns out, federal immigration agents executing arrest warrants for workers at the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plant in Mount Pleasant arrested the wrong Jesus García at his home near the plant – despite his repeated assurances that he was a legal permanent resident.

We see once again how immigration enforcement can adversely affect people lawfully in the country.  How many Jesus Garcia’s there are in the United States?  How many of them are Latina/os?

Jim Harper posted about the raid on Cato @ Liberty and mentioned that

“[i]n my recent paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration,” I discussed what would happen when mistaken identity/identity fraud situations arose in the EEV systems now being debated on Capitol Hill: [L]aw-abiding citizens would regularly stand accused of identity fraud. The SSA and DHS would not know which user of a name-SSN pair was the genuine person and which was using a false identity. EEV would tentatively nonconfirm all users of that name-SSN pair. The “true” individuals attached to fraudulently used identities would learn of identity fraud in their names when they were refused work by EEV and plunged into a bureaucratic morass. Luckily, these victims of the system would just be denied employment and not arrested – if that’s your idea of luck . . .”

KJ