Dick Durbin is right.
The Senate Democrats have proposed immigration reform that includes a biometric identity card, and Sen. Durbin is defending the decision. “People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification,” Durbin said to The Hill. “We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going to help us in this debate on immigration.”
I know secure ID is a libertarian bugaboo, but I just don’t understand their opposition, except from those who don’t really want to enforce the immigration laws. We can’t stop illegal immigration if it’s easy to get a job with fake ID. And we can’t make fake ID hard to get unless we issue good, secure IDs — to everyone.
It’s not an especially persuasive rebuttal to shout “papers, please” in a bad German accent. We show our “papers” every time we fly and every time we undergo a traffic stop. It’s just that the papers we show aren’t very secure. Is there a privacy right to carry only insecure, ineffective ID? And does the right to carry bad ID really outweigh the privacy lost by victims of identity theft — increasingly a crime being committed by illegal workers to evade electronic social security checks?
I don’t think so.
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