by Alec Muffett
Sigh.
THE UNITED STATES has invested tens of billions of dollars in the past decade alone to foil illegal immigration — tightening the border, accelerating deportations, deputizing local police — while doing precious little to stop employers from hiring undocumented immigrants.
That is fixable — by means of a universal national identity card — and must be fixed as part of any sensible overhaul of the nation’s immigration system.
Don’t worry the people who want the immigration “reform” the most are the ones who find any sort of national identity card the most repelant. It is the reason why a majority of the 50 states don’t have standardized driving licenses …
“Sigh” pretty much covers it.
That said, there’s the matter that a driving licence is an identity card in all but name, in the US; to the effect that there’s a “non-driver ID card” (which is basically a driving licence with “not licensed to drive” stamped across it) in a bunch of states. Having done a bit of poking around, I find such ID cards already exist in (in order of finding) NY, NH, MI, VT, DC, ND, NJ, FL, AL, PA, MA, and CT. This is a long way from the full set, of course, and driving (and non-driving) licenses are available to foreign nationals – and as all these documents have photos on them and therefore expire, a tweak in the card formatting to include citizenship details would become effective over time.
Still, in a country where only a third of citizens have passports (this is still larger than the most widely-known statistic; but see http://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbender/2012/01/30/record-number-of-americans-now-hold-passports/ ), it’s a thorny problem…
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