DHS ID rule worries Florida industries

In a collection of essays titled The Essential Tension, the late Thomas Kuhn, an MIT historian of science (and author of the seminal Structure of Scientific Revolutions) discusses and illustrates the most important concept in epistemology: The split between the philosophies of idealism and empiricism. Idealists believe that ideas about the external world are innate. Immanuel Kant was the last major philosopher to articulate the classical position on this, and his influence is still being felt by contemporary neo-Kantian theories and philosophers (for example, the linguists Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker and their ideas about an innate language capability are an example of a neo-Kantian approach). Kant maintained, for example, that the ideas of space and time were so fundamental that they had to be built-in, innate ideas. He argued that the test of this is that if one cannot imagine a universe without a certain idea, then that idea could not have come from external reality. On the other side, John Locke, David Hume, and most of the British philosophers were empiricists: They believed that ideas come from sense data and from external reality.

There are other essential tensions: For example, between the desire for energy independence (which would dictate that coal-rich countries such as the United States and Germany rely much more on coal for energy production) and the desire for clean energy (which would argue for the recution in using of CO2-rich coal for energy production). Another tension is between, on the one hand, the needs of many U.S. companies and, on the other hand, the requirements of national security and immigration control. Here is but the most recent example: The Miami Herald’s Casey Woods and Niala Boodhoo write that a new federal crackdown on illegal immigration would force companies to fire employees whose Social Security numbers and names don’t match government records. If they do not, they would risk harsh penalties — a move that could be devastating to key Florida industries. Business people and immigration advocates say the new measure would wreak havoc on South Florida’s construction, agriculture, and hospitality industries, as well as snare millions of U.S. citizens because of inconsistencies in their Social Security records.

DHS will release the new regulations in the coming days for employers who receive “no-match” letters notifying them of a discrepancy in an employee’s tax records. Such irregularities may indicate a person is using a fake Social Security number