When I was in the fourth grade, our teacher told us that America was better than Russia, because in Russia you had to have a passport to go to a different city. That was a while back.
I went to college in Massachusetts, where the drinking age was 21. One long weekend, I went home with my roommate to Albany, New York. In New York, at the time, the drinking age was 18. I had a learner’s permit that legitimately showed my age as 19. For some reason, I was thrilled at the thought of being able to get a legal drink when a bunch of us went to a tavern for dinner. (I’d already had plenty of the other kind.) But the waiter took a look at it, shook his head, and told us we’d have to leave, because their joint served liquor, and I was probably under age. I think he said my ID was no good because it was from out of state. It didn’t occur to any of us until later in the evening that the real issue was probably the mixed racial composition of our group
Since then, late one night back in the early 1970s, my husband and I (Southsiders as we were) were driving through a Chicago park on the North Side and got pulled over by a cop, who took a look at my husband’s license and remarked, “You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?” He seemed to think that was significant.
About a decade later, I was actually arrested for being unable to produce identification showing a local address (long story, see “The Day I Was Arrested,” which should be somewhere in the archive.) After four hours of unpleasantry, I was released, charged with “disorderly conduct,” and ultimately walked away unconvicted because the police were too embarrassed to show up in court.
Not long afterward, in my first year of law practice, I had a client from Puerto Rico, who had been born somewhere up in the hills. She was in my office because she had just been turned down for welfare benefits for lack of a birth certificate. “But of course I was born,” she said, bewildered. “¡Mira, aqui estoy!” (Look, here I am!) With some difficulty, I managed to explain in my rusty Spanish that they weren’t asking for proof of her existence, but for proof of her American citizenship. That took some digging. I think we resolved it with a baptismal certificate. Dunno whether that would work today.
And now, we have the REAL ID ACT, which looks like it should be an acronym for something, like the USA PATRIOT ACT, which stands for an entire paragraph of anti-terrorist rant. REAL ID, so far as I can tell, is not an acronym, but all the capital letters make it look more serious. In fact, its current legal status is kind of dubious, but for purposes of this discussion that doesn’t matter much. There has been a lot of legislative discussion of the act, and various proposed substitutes for it, most of which revolve around whether we citizens of this Land of the Free really want to have—gasp!—a national ID document.
There are arguments on both sides of this question, but so far as I can tell, nobody wants to raise the real issue here—what we don’t want is not some totalitarian internal passport, but a document that everybody would be required to accept as valid for all purposes. If we had that, nobody could pull what that waiter in Albany pulled on me and my friends—“your ID isn’t good enough for us¸here, now.” Being able to do that is the equivalent of those signs we used to see in Southern places of public accommodation: “We reserve the right to refuse service to ….” without having to specify whom you want to discriminate against, or indicate an intent to violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Remember the mad search for the right version of Obama’s birth certificate? The “long form”? So far as I know, the only document that comes in long and short forms is the DD214, the certificate of discharge from the armed forces. A long form birth certificate would probably read something like the first page of David Copperfield.
Anyway, I’m all for a national ID. One that everybody would have to accept, for any purpose, and that everybody would be able to get, free of charge. Various public officials in Florida, Washington State, Idaho, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and probably lots of other places have actually started programs for issuing state IDs to prisoners as they are released. That solves a major problem for a lot of people who didn’t have access to the appropriate bureaucracies before.
But if you don’t have the good fortune to have been locked up and served your time, you may have a harder time getting an ID. Especially if you’re poor, have mobility problems, and have never had a birth certificate. Since this process is really really localized, I can’t tell you much about how it works where you live, gentle reader, unless you live on the South Side of Chicago. You can google it for your state and county, but be sure to throw in a search for the state and county where you were born, too. If you even know the name of the county where you were born. You can google that too, if necessary. It’s easier now than it used to be, in some ways, because you can google almost anything.
My mother told me that in Cuba, where she was born and brought up, they used to have a really great system (dunno whether it’s still in effect.) When you were born, they started a file on you in the appropriate jurisdiction. After that, any time anything legally significant happened to you (marriage, divorce, death, etc.) the jurisdiction where that happened had to send notice of it to the jurisdiction of your birthplace, where it would be put into the same file. A real “permanent record” like the one they used to scare us with in school. If you knew where somebody was born, you could find out every other legally significant event that had ever happened to her. And prove it to other people. I have occasionally had to search for records of my client’s soon-to-be-ex-spouse’s previous marriages and divorces and ascertain whether there was at least one divorce per marriage. It can be a real hassle. Various on-line services charge big bucks for it, and they earn it.
I have also seen wallet-sized versions of birth certificates (don’t remember from where, don’t know whether anybody still issues them.) That would be really useful too, if everybody issued them and everybody was required to accept them.
There are, by the way, places where people the government doesn’t like (collectively or individually) simply cannot get birth certificates or any other kind of official documentation. They are “un-persons” from birth to death. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights say that’s a violation. But of course, to have human rights, you have to be human. To be human, you have to exist. This is the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar, among some fifty million others.
What we have now in the US is the worst of both worlds. It can be almost impossible to get the “right” kind of ID, and almost impossible to function without it. A former client of mine who for some reasons didn’t have valid ID couldn’t buy a plane ticket (or get on the plane even if he did.) Amtrak sometimes does check ID and sometimes doesn’t. Bus lines don’t. So far. Nor does local transit. Yet.
I don’t really like the idea of internal passports. But what I like even less is the idea that somebody else gets to define, and re-define, ad hoc, the kind of ID that is “acceptable” for a particular purpose, and bar your access if you don’t have it. Anyway, gentle reader, next time you have some time on your hands, if you don’t have a birth certificate, get one. If you have kids, make sure you have theirs too. Ideally, get one before they wheel you out of the maternity ward. And, speaking of identification documents, watch this space for a discourse on How to Become Somebody Else.