Does a National ID Card Spell Doom For CIR?

by Prerna Lal · 2010-03-10 14:22:00 UTC
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Comprehensive immigration reform is bringing us Big Brother. And the euphemism for this new invasion of privacy is a "worker ID card," proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as a key facet of a comprehensive immigration reform legislation.

This new proposal is also propelled by the fact that e-verify is a failure when it comes to identifying undocumented workers and snares U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents instead. Anyone else find it ludicrous how Big Brother can come up with a so-called "tamper-proof" National ID card system but not a "tamper-proof" immigration system? There is no waving away the fact that this plan would likely set into motion a National ID infrastructure that would intrude into all aspects of our lives.

The American Civil Liberties Union went into attack mode on hearing this plan. Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the ACLU, called it a massive invasion of privacy, stating, "we're not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We're also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification."

It's not often that you find FoxNews and the ACLU on the same sid,e but opposition to this proposal is uniting strange bedfellows. For once, even FoxNews gets it right, coming out with five reasons why we should all steer clear of a national ID card system, including the fact that the system would increase business expenses unnecessarily, exclude millions of eligible workers accidentally, force workers to ask the federal government for permission to get a job rather than entering into a simple contract between employer and employee, and criminalize all Americans in a nasty entrapment of "guilty till proven innocent."

No thanks. We already have a Gestapo in the form of an unaudited and unaccountable Department of Homeland Security. The last thing the American public needs is a gateway to a bigger police state. We must support a just and humane plan to legalize 10.8 million undocumented immigrants, but we cannot throw our support behind doing so in a manner that treats every person like a criminal. That is fundamentally UnAmerican.

Photo Credit: GetGetFamous

Prerna Lal is co-founder and Online Coordinator of DreamActivist and a board member of Immigration Equality. She is currently attending George Washington University Law School.
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