Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?

It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.

But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.

> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents?

Unless there is both serious pressure from the state and the population at large supports a massive increase in checking and being checked I struggle to see this working.

During the pandemic various countries experimented with mandating showing of QR codes to do stuff to "prove" compliance ... yet looking back on that, all it seems to have done is accelerate the erosion of trust in politicians and systems of government :/

So a forged or stolen id card will be impossible?

Checking for right to work has been legally required for over a decade. Checks in the formal economy are now routine. Can sometimes be a nuisance, like for my friend who doesn't have a passport and his driving license was issued before those went photographic.

Can't say until the implementation is revealed, but the person you replied to pointed out that fraud at the application stage is a problem.

> Checks in the formal economy are now routine

Someone who is prepared to pay people smugglers to help them cross a border illegally may not choose to restrict themselves to working in "the formal economy".

"Illegal working and streams of taxis - BBC gains rare access inside asylum hotels"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy8ee2w73jo

That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip.

So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them.

I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.

> It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents

For criminals it is already essentially impossible to forge new polycarbonate documents. Acquiring them by defrauding the application processes remains easy however.

Of course, if the person checking doesn't know what the real document feels like in their hand, whether it's real polycarbonate or a shit laminated TESLIN fake makes little difference.