Bill Keller, a rich, white, successful man who has probably never had his citizenship questioned and would doubtlessly be appalled if he did, thinks "Americans should master their anxieties" about national identification cards. Not him, mind you, but the rest of us.
Bill Keller is the former executive editor of the New York Times, which, if the Page One documentary is to be believed, mostly involves staring ponderously out of limo windows whilst expounding upon journalism's imminent precipice; your call as to whether his scotch-face is better than Alec Baldwin's parody of it. Since jumping the NYT ship, he's had an occasional opinion column in which he either says "Twitter WAAH" or "Hillary for VP WAAH" over and over again.
Today he uses his column to address the need for national ID cards. "This is not a peripheral issue," he tells me and the three other people at Gawker who will read his column:
The reason Arizona and other states have deputized police as amateur immigration agents — and contemplated making enforcers out of school principals, emergency-room nurses and other civil servants — is that we have failed so utterly to fortify the most obvious line of defense.
No, the reasons Arizona deputizes police as amateur immigration officers—a post they don't want, by the way—are the same reasons there are people like Joe Arpaio or the random gun-toting vigilantes bothering the borders, or even men like George Zimmerman, hunting down trouble to prove they're needed to stop it—because we have a terrible economy, and we need somebody to blame for it; and because as that economy depletes people's confidence, those people need to reassert their self-worth somehow. Going all Falling Down on illegal immigrants satisfies every one of those requirements. If you need proof of this, consider that the rise in vigilantism corresponds with a massive reversal in immigration rates. These self-deputized border agents are not responding to a problem, they're responding to their own, personal, irrational conception of a problem. How will a national ID card system solve that?
Billy-K understands that some people—he's careful to marginalize them—might feel squeamish about ID cards:
Opponents associate national identification cards with the Nazi roundups, the racial sorting of apartheid South Africa, the evils of the Soviet empire.
Yup, they do.
Civil rights groups see in a national ID — especially one that might be required for admission to the voting booth — a shadow of the poll taxes and literacy tests used to deter black voters in the Jim Crow South.
Uh-huh.
More recently, accounts of flawed watch-list databases and rampant identity theft feed fears for our privacy. The most potent argument against an ID is that the government — or some hacker — might access your information and use it to mess with your life.
Hadn't even thought of this one. Good point!
Billy-K doesn't dispute any of these charges because he doesn't have to. He merely notes that some "activists" have raised these concerns. Which means other activists haven't. That's called objectivity.
| Related Keller: Obama Needs To Become More Centrist, Says This Dope |
Now, the internet has to be lurking round here somewhere. Ah, here it is:
But on the subject of privacy, we are an ambivalent nation. Americans — especially younger Americans, who swim in a sea of shared information — are casual to the point of recklessness about what we put online.
Young people! With their Twitter, and their sexting, and who's this guy named Drake? Even when a Bill Keller article is about immigration, it's still about Twitter.
So imagine that you wanted to design an ID that would effectively control illegal hiring without stirring fears of Big Brother. It would be a single-purpose document, containing only the information that establishes you are eligible to work here. As passports are required for traveling abroad, as library cards are required for checking out books, the ID would be required for starting a job. I’d apply it to future hires only, to avoid forcing employers to be part of a national witch hunt.
You might start with the Social Security card. You would issue a plastic version, and in it you would embed a chip containing biometric information: a fingerprint, an eye scan or a digital photo. The employer would swipe the card and match it to the real you. Unlike your present Social Security card, the new version would be useless to a thief because it would contain your unique identifier. The information would not need to go into a database.
Good call on the future hires only. The best way to sell a policy is to assure those who would vote for it that it will never be used on them: "we must reform this irresponsible, out-of-control entitlement system—for everybody after me." Remember, Bill Keller never, ever, ever has to apply for another job ever again, so fine by him if we go nuts on identity-based hiring requirements. By the by, how does he even know that this is a perfectly innocent way to check someone's nationalization status without stripping them of their dignity?
This is not exotic technology. I just stayed in a hotel in Barcelona that uses a fingerprint reader in place of a room key.
Thank the lord and pass the Tempranillo. From now on, all we have to do for social policy reform is buy Bill Keller a ticket to Europe. He'll find what we need in a hotel, even if he loses his key.
There would be a significant cost to set up and maintain the system, though it’s reasonable to assume that some of that money could be recouped through modest fees and fines on violators.
I can't wait to here the GOP opinion on this.
This will not satisfy those who fear that any such mandate is potentially "a tool for social control,"
No, it won't. Probably the opposite, actually.
But the only way to completely eliminate the risks of a connected world is to burn your documents, throw away your cellphone, cancel your Internet service and live off the grid.
Jesus Christ. Because all "risks of a connected world" are equal, and are not sold separately. Why do I get the feeling that BK is one of those guys who considers thinks weed and heroin are the same?
Like just about everything else, immigration reform is stuck in the mangle of election-year partisanship.
It's actually not. Immigration rates are falling. Obama just jumpstarted the DREAM Act. The GOP is rapidly abandoning its extremist position. Immigration reform actually seems more likely now than it has since Bush first proposed it six years ago. It could conceivably happen in a second Obama term, though it'll be "Obamnesty" within 17 seconds.
And if Congress ever does revert to the business of solving problems, there should be many parts to a humane, sensible immigration bill — including expanded legal immigration and a path to citizenship for many of those already here. But a fraud-proof, limited-use national identification card is an essential part of the package.
Then the Arizona police can go back to doing their real jobs.
Which is what, exactly? Ah, yes, pulling people over demanding their papers. And how do they know from whom to ask for those papers? If you put Bill Keller in an old GMC and had him drive around in the Arizona desert with 1,000 pounds of cocaine in the back, would he ever once be stopped and asked for his biometric social security card? Nope. It doesn't matter what kind of identification BK has, because no AZ cop will ever require it of him.
But a man just as much an American citizen as the former editor of the New York Times, but with darker skin and an Arizona Diamondbacks ballcap, who's finishing up his journalism degree at Arizona State—he'll be asked for his papers over and over again. What this has to do with privacy, or Twitter, or the "connected world" is beyond me. It has to do with how we conceive of our citizens, and whether a certain subsection of American citizens should be subjected to extra scrutiny because of their skin color, or whether we're willing to bear the extra burden of an illegal immigration "problem" so that one of the essential qualities of being an American citizen means the dignity of being above existential suspicion. Bill Keller needs to master his anxiety about that.
---
Follow on Ology: Evan McMurry | PoliticOlogy
Follow on Twitter: @evanmcmurry | @OlogyPolitics
Comments (0)
Be the first to comment!