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and like any other privacy loving liberal I am automatically repulsed by the idea of a national ID card.
However, I have reluctantly come to think a discussion is in order because there are not just cons to the idea there are pros as well.
A national standard for an unforgeable ID card implemented by each state would contribute something to two problems I would like to see Democrats take the lead in offering sound, sensible solutions to, solutions that are consistent with the love of liberty but responsive to current challenges: Illegal immigration and homeland security.
If we can offer effective humane and rational responses to these two problems we can do the nation a service, ordinary citizens a service, paradoxically we can do illegal aliens a service and, by no means least, we can score some serious votes at election time.
You can Google identity cards and glean a lot of pro and con points. Check it out.
We all have to prove who we are with out driver license fairly frequently for the privileges of modern life such as cashing a check, say. These are private transactions but they use a government issued ID for validation of identity. I don't see any issues with that.
Reducing illegal immigration means not ever more draconian enforcement of a Berlin Wall-style border but reducing the financial magnet that low-paying jobs are to even poorer-paid Mexicans. The way to do this is to be able to hold cheap labor employers responsible for hiring only legal applicants. As it is, they can dodge their responsibility on the grounds of being unable to confirm identity. I solid ID card would go a long way, if not all the way toward eliminating that giant excuse.
A side benefit would be that wages would rise as the supply of near-slave labor abated. Americans might be able to keep body and soul together picking strawberries in that case. While we would pay higher prices for some commodities in most cases, I believe, labor costs are less than those of the middlemen who pack, ship and distribute these goods so might have a lesser impact on prices than those who would oppose clamping off the supply of cheap labor would have us believe. I know I would be willing to pay a little more for a peach or to stay in a hotel room if I knew the line workers who made that possible were paid a living wage, were not exploited, were not forced to take the jobs and were legally part of the workforce.
Being able to positively identify aliens would be immensely helpful in homeland security. The fact that so many of the 9/11 terrorists were able to fake who they were because under their real identities they were known to be dangerous helps demonstrate that.
A much more exhaustive list of pros can be constructed, these might not even be the best.
Now a few cons that have to be overcome.
We don't want a government capable of monitoring our every move. Even though cell phone data tells where you were when, and credit card receipts do something of the same, and bank records reveal a great deal about you as does your credit, as do all other activities where you access technology, Americans have always rightly resisted the ability of government to access this information to the most dire of circumstances for specific individuals for specific and limited purposes. The Bill of Rights not only commands that it teaches the principle as well, and I would not change that.
OTOH, you can limit the reasons and purposes for checking ID. Some are obvious such as taking an airplane or train. Some are odious on their face such as at the library if your book-reading habits can be scrutinized by government.
You would have to deal with the routine use of ID cards by the police. I don't know how to do this. One the one hand you want the terrorists picked up in a routine traffic stop to be caught. At the same time you don't want the cops stopping anybody they don't like the looks of and hassling them for their ID. Racial and ethnic profiling could be increased if you are not careful. So you probably set a threshold of an offense committed or demonstrable probably cause.
No ID card would be foolproof or proof in every case of identity. Crime and corruption would still make it possible to falsely obtain one. Work would have to go into decreasing that to the lowest possible level.
One major problem with ID cards is how do you authenticate the person in the first place? Perhaps a card can be technologically designed to be unforgeable (not easy but maybe possible). But the very documents used to apply for the card can always be forged or obtained from a corrupt source. In such a case the ID card provides a false sense of security because the terrorists can still get one but are not who it says they are.
I think it would be hard for an illegal immigrant to falsely obtain a card if you could get the cooperation of foreign governments with respect to the issuance of valid birth certificates, etc. to make forgeries and corruptly obtained false documents difficult or impossible.
Technologically it would probably be possible to make a widget the size of a personal digital assistant into which coded information on valid IDs and their associated biometric information could be downloaded daily or received individually and wirelessly as needed, and for the device to have a scanner for a thumbprint that could be compared to the card. There would be false positives and negatives, of course, with all their consequences.
Again, this is hardly an exhaustive list of problems with ID cards.
Having begun to learn and think a little about this issue I think ID cards look promising, and if we can design a program that gets the best and minimizes the worst we might be onto something good for both illegal immigration and homeland security without sacrificing the anonymity we enjoy as Americans or doing harm to the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
What do you think?
P.S. What to do about the illegal immigrants who would be squeezed out of their livelihoods by this? Roll back NAFTA so that a highly subsidized American agro-giant can't sell a bag of American wheat in Mexico at an artificial price that is less than the local farmer can produce and sell it. That would be a start toward resurrecting indigenous economies once capable of supporting locals. It isn't enough, I know, but it is a big step in the right direction.
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