The immigration reform has not even been drafted yet but has already raised substantial controversy.

Part of the commotion around the reform is thanks to New York Senator Charles Schumer who suggested that apart from the path to legalization of 10-12 million undocumented immigrants, the reform would also entail measures to curb the influx of undocumented foreigners to the United States.

The most doubts were generated by the idea of creating a new advanced nation-wide workers verification system which would use biometric information from American citizens. Establishing the system would mean creating a nation-wide database to store information on all workers employed in the United States. The specific nature of the database has become the focus of protests carried out by advocates of privacy rights.

Other issues of concern here are the costs of creating and maintaining the system, as well as the American citizens' agreement to participate in the undertaking. There are millions of people in the country who do not want to have anything to do with the federal government and have never even applied for a passport.

No wonder then, that the experts from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), one of the most respectable and impartial think-tanks in Washington, that do studies on immigration, are warning against Sen. Schumer's plan. According to them, rather than creating a brand new system, it would be more sensible to improve the existing e-Verify, that also relies on data from the federal databases, but does not use biometric information. For the time being, one of the biggest flaws of the e-Verify is that it is not able to indicate individuals who are using somebody else's identity and documents.

The plans to increase control over individuals' work eligibility can be understandable. Politicians, who decide to engage in the unpopular immigration issues, almost obsessively are trying to avoid mistakes that were made during the amnesty of 1986. As it turned out then, the legalization of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants was not accompanied by a method to control the influx of new undocumented immigrants, who were drawn here by the availability of labor employment in the "black" market. As a consequence, now every twentieth worker in the United States is undocumented.

Schumer, who has promised to draft the immigration bill by the end of the summer, and will probably be one of the major sponsors of the bill, does not want to jeopardize being accused of passing another immigration amnesty law without securing measures to curb illegal immigration.

The White House has assumed a similar position. Barack Obama has made increasing control of the labor market the first step in his immigration reform. The problem is that creating a new, all-encompassing database may turn out to be an insurmountable task. For many employers in the country (there are more than 7 million of them), especially the owners of small companies, the jump from I-9 paper forms to biometric data will be impossible. Looking for other solutions, such as improving the e-Verify system seems more reasonable.