Just out of curiousity, how do you police illegal immigration without some form of I.D.?
The way you police ILLEGAL ALIENS is to require all LEGAL immigrants to carry a digital ID card, and digital visas . A simple green card makes it easy to copy and forge, a digital ID on the line of most drivers licenses today would make it easy to verify the identity of immigrants and weed out the ILLEGALS from the legals. No need for a national ID, we live in freedom here and an ID is another chunk out of our freedoms.
If you can't see the danger of requiring a national ID then you have a problem.
"Just out of curiousity, how do you police illegal immigration without some form of I.D.?"
That's an excellent question, and one that doesn't get raised often enough. In reality, there's not much of a way to enforce those laws without some recognizable form of I.D.
Social Security numbers don't work, since they can be obtained pretty easily, really, and the Social Security card isn't an I.D. anyhow, since it doesn't include a photo or any fingerprints or any such stuff.
A birth certificate is useless, too, since you can get one by sending a request for it to the local county clerk. A quick trip to a local newspaper archive for the year you were born will pop up a number of names you can use to request a birth certificate.
Driver's licenses....well, they'll do, as long as the process of getting one involves some sort of proof of citizenship. But you can see the two paragraphs above for ways around that.
How DO we tell who is a citizen and who is not? That's a tough question, and I don't have a good answer for it.
Recent naturalized citizens have their naturalization papers, even if they only speak English haltingly. I have my passport, which should serve.
Policing illegal immigration is treating the symptom. Tens of millions of illegal immigrants arrive because (a) it's so hard to be legal, and (b) socialism gives them a great deal for nothing.
If the gov't would stop stealing from legals and giving to illegals, thus curtailing the demand for entry at all costs, there wouldn't be a need to police illegal immigrants.
"Papieren, bitte" ("papers, please") was long considered the indicator of the worst of totalitarian governance. Suddenly it's considered normal and expected - that indicates something has gone horribly wrong.
It only restricts the lawful.
Same way they do today. Ignore the illegals and send the folks who have ID the bill.
Well, a good start would be to run in anybody for closer scrutiny who can't speak English and who can't produce a passport or a work Visa. They don't have any problems finding out when Americans have phony ID. Chances are, people who speak very fluent English, particularly if they're black or white and don't speak with foreign accent, are not going to be illegal aliens. It would also be a good standard to impose on employers in their hiring practices, too.
The solution is not to tag Americans like so many cattle. We act so offended by the notion of asking for "papers" on illegals for the purpose of identifying them, but seem to have no such distaste for doing it to Americans. What is wrong with this picture?