I was pleased a couple of months ago to point out where presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D‑IL) had distinguished himself and gotten it right on whether driver licensing should be linked to immigration status. The use of driver licensing for immigration enforcement is a major impetus behind the national ID system that our country should rightly avoid.

Such pleasures don’t last. The senator published an opinion piece in the Charlotte Observer this week calling for a “mandatory electronic system that enables employers to verify the legal status of their employees within days of hiring them.”

It is very hard to hold both positions. As I pointed out in my recent paper on electronic employment verification, it is nearly impossible to “strengthen” internal enforcement of immigration law through EEV without creating a national identification system:

[T]he things necessary to make a system like this really impervious to forgery and fraud would convert it from an identity system into a cradle-to-grave biometric tracking system. Almost no way exists to do national EEV that is not a step down that road.

Perhaps Senator Obama would implement an EEV system with a federally issued national ID card rather than the driver licensing system. (That’s not a good option either.) Perhaps he’s devised a credentialing system that allows people to prove eligibility to work under current immigration law without a national ID. (Such things are possible.) Most likely, the senator has expressed two pretty much irreconcilable positions.