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Papers, Please!

A surprising number of America’s most pressing problems can be solved with a single, simple solution: a national ID. So why don’t we have one?

by
Michael Lind
November 18, 2024
Michael Lind
Michael Lind chronicles civilizational shifts and national trends, writing about American politics and culture with a deep understanding of history and appreciation for America's highest ideals.
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A scrutineer checks the identity card of an elector voting in France

Pascal Guyot/AFP via Getty Images

What if there was a simple, technical solution for some of our most pressing political and social problems? The writer Evgeny Morozov has used the term “solutionism” to mock the belief of many in Silicon Valley that, in the case of many social challenges, “there is an app for that.” So you would be justified in being suspicious if I told you that there is a single, simple, technical solution to minimizing illegal immigrant employment and voting in the United States—a solution which would also simplify the number of documents needed to prove your ID and could help with passing new privacy laws governing what for-profit corporations can do with your personal data. There really is such a technical panacea: a national ID for every American citizen.

Thanks to modern technology, the ID can be digital. The EU is creating a new “digital wallet” for every citizen. The digital identity can be used for multiple purposes, including accessing public services, opening a bank account, filing tax returns, proving your age, checking into a hotel, or renting a car. Far from being a threat to privacy, the new digital wallet will limit the information that private companies now routinely demand from users of their services. In Estonia for the past two decades citizens have already been using the digital identity system—the “e-ID”—to vote, pay bills, sign contracts, access health information, and perform other activities.

National ID cards—both physical, and increasingly, digital, are the norm in the 21st-century world, with at least 170 out of almost 200 countries in the world using them. Most countries, including almost all democracies, also require photo voter IDs to deter fraud. In its refusal to adopt these basic protections for the rights of its citizens, the U.S. is an outlier even in the democratic world.

The idea of an American national ID is not new. In the 1990s the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by former Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, recommended the adoption of a computerized national registry against which prospective employers could check the identity data of potential employees; this gave rise to today’s limited E-Verify system. Then in 2005 a commission that studied ways to strengthen electoral integrity, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, recommended that citizens should be required to present a photo ID in order to vote.

Both proposals were thwarted by the opposition of three groups: libertarian ideologues, partisan Democrats, and lobbyists for big businesses that want to be able to hire illegal immigrants with impunity. Needless to say, the third and most important group—scofflaw employers—did not identify their motivation honestly. Instead, they were content to let the case against photo voter IDs and a national ID to be made by libertarian kooks and partisan Democrats on seemingly idealistic grounds.

Whenever the topics of voter ID laws and a national ID come up, the libertarians of the left and right screech “papers, please”—as though asking for a photo ID to vote or get a job is somehow inherently more Hitlerian than needing an ID to drive a car or buy beer. The “papers, please” motif is invoked in the ACLU’s official position on the subject:

As a nation, we live by the principle that the government should not be able to collect such information without cause. A national ID system turns that fundamental principle on its head. We must continue to support basic freedoms and protect against our country where the government can demand, “Papers, please.”

The premise of the “papers, please!” fear-mongering is that you, the law-abiding citizen, would have to have your national ID with you at all times, or else you could be stopped randomly by the authorities and … and what? Be arrested? Summarily shot?

On many trips to Europe, I have never been randomly asked for my papers by any police officer or other official; I have only been asked to show my passport at customs and my tickets to get on planes and trains. So maybe making public policy in the U.S. based on stereotypes of other countries in Hollywood movies from a previous century is not a very bright idea.

There are two reasons for the failure of voter ID laws to gain support in Congress: Democratic electoral strategy and the self-interest of businesses and banks that profit from illegal immigration.

According to the ACLU, “we live by the principle that the government should not be able to collect such information without cause.” But federal and state governments—not to mention private corporations—routinely collect endless amounts of personal information in endlessly multiplying formats, making life more difficult for American citizens than for citizens of other democracies. For some purposes you need a copy of your birth certificate; for others, a driver’s license; for still others, a Social Security number; and for yet others, a passport number.

So why not substitute a single, universal, fool-proof photo ID for all of those documents, in both a physical form and online? It seems that freedom and democracy can survive as long as we have lots of different de facto and overlapping national IDs. But if we adopted a single one … cue marching Nazis and the guard on the train: “Your papers, pleece.”

The crackpot libertarians of the right agree with the crackpot left libertarians of the ACLU. After the Jordan Commission proposed a national computer registry for all American workers, the Koch-funded Cato Institute rushed out a policy brief by John J. Miller and Stephen Moore: “A National ID System: Big Brother’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

Anticipating the objection that we already have Social Security numbers, Miller and Moore revived an argument of opponents of Social Security in the 1930s and claimed that Social Security numbers have already put Americans on the road to serfdom:

The computer revolution made use of Social Security numbers prevalent in myriad everyday and public transactions. Everything from credit to employment to insurance to many states’ drivers licenses requires a Social Security number. Social Security numbers have become de facto national identifiers. All that from a number whose original purpose was to do nothing more than track the amount of money paid into the Social Security system.

Thank you, Grandpa, for your rant about Social Security as a tool of Big Brother. Now tell us again about why we need to go back to the gold standard.

But wait. It gets worse. National IDs and photo voter ID requirements of the kind common in other liberal democracies are not only totalitarian, according to libertarians of the left and right, but also—unlike passports and driver’s licenses—inherently racist and classist. That’s according to progressives who insist that there are great numbers of poor people who do not have driver’s licenses or similar government-approved photo IDs because they cannot afford them. Yet when it comes to poor Medicaid patients who have to show IDs in order to get medicine at drugstores, such objections apparently don’t apply. But even if it was true that poor people “can’t afford” IDs, the answer would be for the government to pay for them—as it does in France, Germany, and other democratic countries.

Is it racist to require voters to show government-approved IDs in order to vote? Progressives routinely describe voter ID laws as “voter suppression,” comparing them to techniques used in the Jim Crow South to disfranchise Black Americans, like literacy tests and poll taxes. Yet that comparison is plainly absurd—and makes a mockery of the real-world suffering and deprivation that Black Americans endured. Under Jim Crow, there was no doubt about the identity of the individuals who were turned away from the polls; Black voters were prevented from voting precisely because they were who they said they were, not because they were impostors.

In the progressive fear-mongering universe, we are supposed to believe that members of minority groups who are allowed to vote now, without a photo ID, would be turned away from the polls after showing their free government-issued photo IDs. If progressives were truly concerned about legitimate voters being turned away from the polls illegally on account of their race or other characteristics, then a government-issued photo ID would seem like an excellent method to eliminate the crimes they purport to fear. Yet oddly enough, they oppose this commonsense reform.

Well, perhaps voter ID laws are racist in a way that does not obey simple logic, but is nevertheless obvious to Black and Hispanic Americans from their lived experience. In that case, one would expect majorities of those groups to oppose them. Yet requiring all voters to show government-issued photo IDs is approved by 75% of Black Americans, 81% of non-Hispanic white Americans, 84% of Asian Americans, and 85% of Hispanic Americans. That’s right—Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans are in fact more likely than white Americans to favor voter ID laws, which three-quarters of Black Americans favor as well.

If the arguments against voter ID laws and a possible national ID are so ridiculous, then what explains the failure of these proposals to gain support in Congress? There are two reasons: Democratic electoral strategy and the self-interest of businesses and banks that profit from illegal immigration.

From the election of Barack Obama in 2008 until the defeat of Kamala Harris in this year’s election, most Democrats bought into the idea that immigration in general, and Hispanic immigration in particular, would inevitably create a permanent Democratic majority, consisting of the minority of whites who are college-educated and affluent in alliance with Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters who are clients of the party. That is why one-party Democratic cities and states have passed sanctuary city laws, forbidding their police forces from cooperating with federal immigration law enforcement—while rewarding illegal immigrants with city and state welfare services and driver’s licenses. The more immigrants, legal and illegal, the bigger the future Democratic majority—or so they imagine. Needless to say, if immigrants tended to vote for Republicans rather than Democrats, there would be no sanctuary city laws in Democratic jurisdictions.

However, the shocking nationwide shift of minority voters of all races, particularly Hispanics, away from the Democratic Party in 2024 has demolished the idea that Hispanics and Asians as “people of color” will vote as blocs for Democrats the way that Black Americans have done since the civil rights revolution. In the aftermath of the election, many stunned Democrats may be wondering if they have accidentally imported the next generation of Republican voters. (If I may engage in some Tom Friedmanesque taxi-driver sociology, I would like to point out that two Uber drivers I recently hired, one a recent Nigerian immigrant and the other a Venezuelan, had both entered the country under Biden. Both men said that if they could vote, they would vote for Trump.)

The Democratic electoral disaster of 2024 may therefore be a blessing in disguise for both the party and the country as a whole. If Democrats no longer think they can benefit electorally by opposing voter ID laws of the kind used almost everywhere else in the world, the only remaining opposition will be that of lobbies for employers who hire illegal immigrants in violation of statutes that have long been on the books.

Employers who use illegal labor can threaten to punish elected officials who vote to enforce the law by funding their opponents in primary or general elections. But their cause cannot be defended in public. The cheap-labor, law-breaking employer lobby may attempt to frighten the public into opposing immigration law enforcement, claiming that without a serf caste of millions of exploited illegal immigrants who are denied minimum wage and basic safety protections there would be no food on our tables and the economy would collapse. But the cheap-labor lobby, shameless as it is, cannot publicly argue against voter ID and national ID laws without raising the question of who really benefits, and at what cost.

In sum, there are no serious arguments against the adoption by the U.S. of a digital national ID which can be used, among other things, to ensure that illegal immigrants cannot work or vote in this country. Any debate about what to do with the 20 million or more illegal immigrants whose presence is encouraged here now by the American elite is pointless, until future illegal immigration is checked. Requiring a national ID to work or vote is a good place to start there, too—at much lower cost than building a physical wall along the border. President-elect Donald J. Trump might prefer something grander, but he might be appeased by thought of each and every one of our new national IDs bearing his name, presidential signature, and smiling face, guaranteeing to each and every American their rights to fair employment and a fair vote just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

The argument of right-wing libertarians and the ACLU that a national ID would turn the U.S. into a totalitarian state is as stupid as claims in the 1930s that Social Security numbers would turn us into a nation of faceless government slaves. In the aftermath of the browning of the Republican electorate in 2024, intelligent Democrats should abandon the assumption that their party inevitably benefits from nonwhite mass immigration, both legal and illegal. What remains after silly libertarian arguments and discredited partisan Democratic strategy is only the raw greed and political power of sleazy employers and their well-funded lobbies in Washington and state capitals. It’s time to ask them to show ID.

Michael Lind is a Tablet columnist, a fellow at New America, and author of Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America.