I met a panhandler who said he has two uncashed paychecks because he has no valid ID and no way to remedy that situation. Who knows whether that's true or not, but I liked the comments of someone on Daily Kos enough to look up her old posts, and I realized that she, too, has been caught up in ID hell.
What if we jobbed, IDed, bank-accounted folks here were in some horrible earthquake or fire, and we lost all of our ID, and all of the old bills and bank statements we might use to replace our ID? We'd be in deep trouble.
So, I think it's really important -- in a small-scale, doable way -- for Congress to set up some kind of procedures that people without the right documents to get normal passports and drivers' licenses can use to get valid passports and licenses.
Otherwise, we could end up with a huge population of U.S. citizens who dwell in poverty, in the shadows, simply because their passports and licenses are lost or expired.
It seems as if the U.S. ID problem is a cousin of the "property rights" problem.
Some economists are arguing that one of the major sources of poverty in the world is the existence of large classes of people who, for whatever reason, cannot officially own their homes, tools, cars, etc.
People who own a home outright may be poor, but they can borrow against the value of their homes and use the cash to try to improve their lot.
People who, from a legal point of view, are squatters in their own homes may have to squander a lot of energy just trying to stay in their own homes, even though the homes are clearly theirs and they've done nothing wrong.
In the United States, we've created a huge class of "illegal aliens" who have a hard time owning a bank account or other things in a legally proper way because of status issues. Maybe that's a necessary evil, but what about people who live in the United States and lose their ability to legally own their own identity simply because hey were a little disorganized, or too poor to keep passports and licenses up-to-date, or the victims of theft, fire, etc.?
Private lawyers don't usually have time to help people like that. My guess is that most over-burdened Legal Aid offices probably throw up their hands at cases like these and tell people to do their own legwork. And, in some cases, it sounds as if the difference between what kinds of documents various states demand and the documents that poor, disorganized people can actually provide are enormous.
Stateline.org ran an article about this problem in 2007:
When Colorado state Sen. Andy McElhany (R) championed adoption of the strictest identification requirements in the country, his aim was to keep illegal immigrants off state welfare rolls. He didn’t anticipate making it harder for his 15-year-old daughter to get a learner’s permit.
But that’s what happened when his wife and daughter showed up at the Division of Motor Vehicles office in Colorado Springs in September. They brought the teen’s passport, only to discover DMV had changed the rules and a passport was no longer a sufficient form of identification.
"There's no reason to believe a 15-year-old girl is going to be running around with a fake passport just to get a driver's permit," a chagrined McElhany said.
Going to the DMV never has been a walk in the park, but it’s likely to get even more difficult as states across the country begin to comply with stringent federal identification rules required by the 2005 Real ID Act. ...
... advocates for the poor said caseworkers are overwhelmed with families needing social services that need help tracking down certified birth certificates. The Denver Department of Human Services, which helps poor people order and pay for duplicates of their birth certificates, had about twice as many folks seeking help a month after the law took effect and expects a doubling again by 2007, according to spokeswoman Sue Cobb.
Somehow, for example, I think we need to create an affidavit system, so that people without any valid ID can get a few people to vouch for them and their citizenship status, and us that to get proper IDs. Maybe the IDs should be temporary in nature, but they should be IDs that people can use to get jobs, collect unemployment checks, etc., so that people aren't stranded in limbo simply because of lack of valid passports.
We also need to decide who -- post office workers, Legal Aid counselors, etc. -- is in charge of helping people with ID problems, and we have to bite the bullet and budget for that, even though this is a horrible time to find new ways to spend money.
The budget deficit is horrible, but turning people into shadows just because they let their ID expire is also horrible. There are a lot of big, confusing, complicated problems that are very hard to solve, but this would should be fairly quick and easy to solve, and we should solve it.