The Real ID Act is going to make America safer, persecuting illegal immigrants is God's will and Santa Claus is joining the Republican primaries to vote for Mitt Romney. Please! If we are willing to swallow such arguments, we deserve what we have. This entry is the letter I have sent The Examiner with respect to the commentaries quoted from the St. Louis Post on January 17 and the Buffalo News on January 18 on the Real ID Act, one of the most deceitful pieces of legislation of the last times and result of one of the most shameful pieces of recent history. I hope that we do not wake up one day realizing that we have suffered another catastrophic attack because we diverted our security forces to please the xenophobia of these people.
In the Germany of the 30s a psychopath used the existing anti-Semitism of his society to make most of the country join him in blaming the Jews for the painful conditions of the Versailles Treaty and most of the German people, no matter how stupid the arguments, were comfortable believing this and then other tales. We all know what happened next. When I see that 20% of the Republican base in Iowa, a state hit by the coming economic recession in a country at war, consider persecuting illegal immigrants a priority at the primaries, I worry.
The Buffalo News’s commentary "The REAL ID Act (was) designed to make it more difficult for terrorists to get government issued identification cards" of the 18th and the St. Louis Post’s commentary "The bipartisan 9/11 Commission thought that was a good idea. So did Congress" of the 17th are completely misleading.
What the 9/11 Commission asked in the page 390 of its report is federally issued "standards for the issuance of (...) sources of identification, such as drivers licenses" but the Commission never asked legal presence. What’s more, the Commission complained about terrorists who had come legally from Canada in the 90s due to Canada’s more lax immigration-related scrutiny of documents. But what is really shameful is that Republican Congressmen who filled their mouths with national security in the 2002 elections blocked in Congress recommendation of the 9/11 in December of 2004 led by James Sensenbrenner because the bill didn’t include the anti-immigrant lines the Commission never asked. As a result of a compromise, Congress agreed to support Sensenbrenner’s xenophobia in another law, the Real ID Act, in exchange of this ultraconservative wing stopped blocking the Commission’s recommendations.
Not only is grossly evident that you don’t have to be an illegal immigrant to seek fraudulent documents (Any teenager willing to buy a beer knows that) and that the 9/11 terrorists would not have aborted their plot just because they could not have got driver licenses (Worse, Atta could have gotten his driver license despite the Real ID Act!) but also that once again these people are diverting our security resources, urgently needed against our real enemies.
This was the way the xenophobic right put on its knees our legitimate expectative for an improved security to serve its xenophobia. At least the 1924 nativists were more honest with respect to their real reasons.