WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Wednesday gave final approval to a bill that requires the detainment of unauthorized immigrants accused of theft and violent crimes, marking the first legislation that President Donald Trump can sign as Congress, with some bipartisan support, swiftly moved in line with his plans to crackdown on illegal immigration.
I am not sure what this bill actually changes. Do we not already detain anyone accused of theft or violent crimes? How would them being an unauthorized migrant even be a known factor unless they have already been detained?
It will certainly embolden some people to snitch, which is likely the intention.
In Spain we have a national id document. It’s the size of a credit card and has your photo (and we all look like terrorists in that photo 🤪). And nobody dies for having it in the wallet.
The weird thing in the US is we will never, ever have a mandatory National ID, because too many people think the government would abuse it. Reagan even called the idea the Mark of the Beast.
But we have our Social Security Numbers, which were originally supposed to just be a thing the government used internally, and in fact the SSN was never supposed to be used as ID. But lazy companies still did, anyway. I am old enough that when I went to college, my SSN was directly used as my student ID, and had to be entered on all forms, and I still have some of my physical grade reports with the whole SSN printed on it, in plain text.
But since it is tied in to income tax reporting, most financial institutions need to have it, and then it expanded to credit reporting bureaus, and now simply knowing someone’s SSN and address is enough to open fraudulent accounts. The Government never mandated that, it was lazy companies who decided not to issue their own numbers.
So maybe Reagan had a point, but it wasn’t the government we needed to be afraid of back then. But in Trump’s America, anyone who looks “foreign” will be presumed to be here illegally unless they can produce a magic document. (Even, ironically, indigenous peoples whose heritage here dates back much further than all the people in charge right now.)