RALEIGH — I have a national identity card issued to me by the government. I must show it as a condition for transacting many forms of business, public and private, for which it is also often required that I supply a second, government-issued identity number.
So do you.
This remains a (largely) free society. Still, the drift is obvious. For decades, politicians had promised nervous voters that they would not be required to carry national ID cards. But over time, state-issued licenses to drive the public highways have become, de facto, a system of national ID cards. Similarly, Social Security recipients were told that their account numbers would be used only for the purposes of tracking payroll taxes and distributing benefits. But over time, the Social Security number became a person’s identification code, though not yet stamped on your forearm as a bar-code tatoo (just a little red meat for the black-helicopter crowd, assuming they aren’t also vegetarians).
In the midst of a continuing war on terror abroad and various “wars” of varying merit here at home, including a praiseworthy one against rampant identity theft, issues involving state drivers’ licenses cannot be limited simply to ensuring safe roadways. That’s one reason why North Carolina’s recent controversy surrounding the licensure of illegal immigrants featured so many passionate people talking ever so furiously past each other.
Hispanic groups in the state are still up in arms over the Easley administration’s decision to stop accepting a card issued by Mexican authorities as proof of identification for acquiring a NC license. They argue that this is little more than a back-door way to deny licensure to illegal immigrants altogether, a cause that some of Easley’s opponents among the Republican gubernatorial hopefuls had been championing for months. Furthermore, they argue that whether to issue a driver’s license should be a matter of highway policy, not immigration policy. If aliens are already in the state, working and traveling, wouldn’t it be better if they were properly licensed and adequately insured?
Many advocates of tightening the rules see this argument as nonresponsive to their concerns. Some do, in fact, wonder why people in the country illegally, and thus starting out their lives in America as law-breakers, should be able to acquire legal status as motorists. They also (properly) doubt that previous efforts had been sufficient to ensure immigrant drivers carried adequate liability insurance, anyway.
Fundamentally, however, both sides in the immigration debate — and as I’ve written previously, I find myself uncharacteristically in a sort of middle ground between the two poles — are missing the point about licensure. These cards now function as the primary means of identification, with a sort of “race to the bottom” dynamic in play in which states with the most lax standards become the entry points into the system for people up to no good.
And by that terminology, I don’t mean immigrants looking to work hard and achieve the American dream. I mean criminals, foreign or domestic, looking to evade authorities and establish new M.O.s. I mean identity thieves seeking to pilfer and defraud. I mean chronic drunk drivers who use fake documents to continue their dangerous behavior. I mean scam artists, foreign and domestic, who rip off taxpayers by falsely qualifying for welfare, housing, health care, disability, or pension benefits. And I mean Islamo-fascist thugs who seek to do us great and mortal harm.
In this environment, it is not possible to treat the driver’s license as a convenience for motorists, much as we might wish to. Federal authorities were convinced that the Mexican-issued documents North Carolina was accepting before Easley’s policy change were too easy to fake and abuse.
Meanwhile, state officials are looking at a separate proposal to allow more drivers to renew their licenses online. While any such change needs to be taken with great care, advocates say the practice may actually reduce the possibility of identity theft, a tantalizing prospect that deserves more study and consideration.
I wish I didn’t have to prove my identity so often, and with documents sanctioned by a government that continues to grow intrusive and costly. But I do. So do you. And we can’t afford for the system to be easy for crooks and killers to game.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.