After having been soundly roasted over prayer services in Georgia, I’ll foolishly dare to broach another subject where I seem to have a knack for fueling a few flames: immigration.
In the past couple of days, a couple of news items caught my eye, as much for timing as for subject matter.
First, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, it seems that the Board of Supervisors are looking at adopting New Haven style municipal ID’s:
The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to issue municipal identification cards to city residents - regardless of whether they are in the country legally[...]
The legislation would require companies holding city contracts to accept the municipal card as a legitimate form of identification - except in cases where other state and federal laws require other forms of proof of age, name and residence.[...]
Ammiano said banking institutions in San Francisco have signaled their willingness to accept the municipal ID card for the purpose of setting up accounts. He noted that people without bank accounts are frequently more vulnerable to theft and robbery.
At around the same time, word comes from New York that Governor Spitzer is backing off his plan to permit a not-valid-for-federal-ID class of drivers licenses which wouldn’t require disclosure of immigration status. From the New York Times:
Gov. Eliot Spitzer is abandoning his plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, saying that opposition is just too overwhelming to move forward with such a policy.[...]
“I am not willing to fight to the bitter end on something that will not ultimately be implemented,” the governor said, “and we also have an enormous agenda on other issues of great importance to New York State that was being stymied by the constant and almost singular focus on this issue.”
Illegal immigration and id issues are topics that I tend to recreationally mull over and waffle around quite a bit on.
On the ID front, I can see the value of making sure that everyone participating in society is able to provide adequate identification…given that today’s society is hung up on identity issues.
(Personally, I’m a bit disappointed that we are so hung up on identity, and I think that if we are going to be this concerned we ought to go ahead and start tattooing barcodes and/or implanting RFID chips onto/into the backs of everyone’s hands or on/in everyone’s forehead….but that’s a discussion for another day.)
However, I am also aware of the fraud issues that arose when Tennessee and North Carolina sought to issue immigration-blind drivers licenses. If you are creating a legal/procedural process to grant some legitimacy to illegality, I can believe there’s an inherent incentive for some folks to abuse that process.
Stepping back and looking at this as part of the larger immigration debate…well, it’s a really difficult picture to gaze upon.
A good law-and-order argument can be made that it is completely unacceptable to in any way, shape, or form condone a systemic flaunting of our laws. If as a society we regard immigration law with contempt…or disregard it completely…aren’t we opening the door to ignoring other laws? If we’re going to have a law, it should either be enforced, or revised into something realistically enforceable.
However, I also see the sense in a realistic observation that there are millions of undocumented immigrants in the country…and many (most?) of them fill a useful role in today’s society. True, if the labor pool formed by undocumented immigrants suddenly disappeared, the economy would adapt, either by supporting higher pay that would attract workers with legal status, or by moving away from industries that exist due to the availability of cheap labor.
Also, we have that niggling detail about whether it’s realistic to seek to deport a few million folks.
If press and blog coverage on the debate surrounding immigration can be believed, it’s a rather polarized set of opinions. Many folks take the seemingly xenophobic stance that all illegal immigrants ought to be removed from the country, and borders be made perfectly secure….cost and damage to the economy be danged.
Other folks take a far more liberal stance of opening the borders and forgiving the folks already here…ignoring the potential instability in the economy a potential influx of people and drain on social services such a change would entail.
Meanwhile, I’m standing here somewhere in the middle, thinking that something ought to be done to instill some sense in immigration policy—that folks who want to come here to work ought to be able to do so, without too much hassle, and assuming that there is room for them in the workforce.
That doesn’t do anything about the status of the undocumented folks who are alredy here…but I’m not sure that’s a question that has an easy answer…especially when immigration law is messed-up and unenforced, providing almost no disincentive to keep folks from continuing to ignore it.