Needed: A National ID Card for Americans

Needed: A National ID Card for Americans
By Daniel G. Jennings
We need a national ID card for all citizens and legal residents of the United States.
Such a card is needed because it would help ensure our national security, greatly reduce illegal immigration and protect the rights of law abiding Americans of all races and backgrounds. The card would help law enforcement officers do their job and make life easier for average Americans.
The national ID card would simply be a plastic card with a picture on it and a magnetic strip similar to a credit card. The national ID card would work like a credit card, when somebody needed to verify an individual’s ID they’d simply swipe it through a credit card reader. The reader would be connected to a national database which would only out basic information the legal status, age, sex and a brief description of the individual.
This way, all a perspective employer or immigration agent would have to do to verify an employee’s legal status would be swipe the card. Employers would then easily be able to check the immigration status of all perspective employees. So could immigration agents. Police officers could verify people’s identity quickly and easily. So could screeners at airports.
T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union for border patrol officers, told Time magazine that such a card would eliminate the need for massive security measures at our borders. No Berlin Wall or big fence on the border, no massive armies of border patrolmen, no massive bureaucracy trampling the rights of Hispanic Americans. A simple card could end the massive employment of immigrants and end the problem.*
Under the national card, companies would have no excuse to employ illegal immigrants. Law enforcement officers could enforce the law cheaply and easily. Yes criminals would eventually duplicate the card and sell fake ones but this would be expensive and time consuming.
The card wouldn’t lead to discrimination to the contrary it would make discrimination based on race or ethnicity harder. If a law abiding legal citizen or resident of Hispanic heritage applied for a job for which he or she was qualified and presented the card which verified this. A bigoted employer would have no excuse not to hire the Hispanic. The Hispanic would have an excellent case for a discrimination law suit, the card proved his legal status and the bigot didn’t hire him.
So why don’t we have a national ID card especially since it makes a great deal of sense? Because of the opposition from extremists on the right and the left. Self proclaimed civil rights activists on the left have denounced the card as racist (how a card can be racist I don’t know) and libertarians and Christians on the right denounced it as an evil tool of big government. These extremists are of course financed by big business interests that profit from illegal immigration. Big business wants it easy to employ illegal immigrants and hard to enforce immigration laws. The card would make it hard to employ illegal immigrants and easy to enforce immigration laws.
Every time the national ID card issue is brought up dozens of highly paid champions of freedom and the downtrodden descend upon the TV studios to warn us of its evils and dangers. These champions of civil liberties all have expensive clothes and big bankrolls thanks to their friends in big business.
It is time for America to stop listening to the extremists and big business and join the rest of the world in adopting the common sense measure of a national ID card.
* “Time” magazine Sept. 20, 2004.