Imigration stories: round-up

Today’s Washington Post focuses on the controversy over a national ID card. Looking back through history, the article by Darryl Fears recalls that Alan Simpson proposed ID cards during the 1986 immigration debate, but that the idea was promptly nipped in the bud. Rep. Roybal of California invoked Nazi Germany in his opposition to the plan.

Taking us to the present day, the article notes that “across the ideological divide, immigration opponents and supporters in the current emotional debate over illegal immigration — Republicans, Libertarians and Democrats who disagree on a broad range of issues — repudiate a national identification system.”

Of course, the REAL ID Act from last year is really a sort of national ID card legislations insofar as it imposes federal standards on state drivers’ licenses. Without generating the same hostility as the words “national ID card” seem to invoke, that bill seeks to accomplish the same goal: relatively uniform forms of identification that can be used, among other things, to ascertain citizenship status.

The Post also has a story on AZ governor Janet Napolitano, calling her approach to immigration “tough but fair.” Again, looking at history, the article notes that 20 years ago, Napolitano represented a church against accusations of harboring undocumented migrants in violation of the law. Her views changed when she was a US attorney because of the “crush” of immigration smuggling cases. (Wayne Cornelius and others have written elsewhere about the fact that the crush of smuggling in AZ may in fact be a bi-product of unsound restrictions in urban centers like El Paso and San Deigo). So Napolitano has pushed for tougher immigration policies, including the use of the AZ national guard, along the southern border. Apparently, this is not tough enough for some of the Republicans in AZ. The article quotes Napolitano as replying:

“‘We’re not going to seal the border; we can’t,’ she said, referring to vast stretches of forbidding desert. ‘When I hear congressional and media people saying, ‘Shut the border,’ I think to myself, ‘They’ve never seen the border.’ You can’t possibly have been to the Arizona-Mexico border and believe that is possible.'”

And the national section of the LA Times has a story by Jennie Jarvey about public libraries who are cutting back on nacent efforts to provide Spanish language literature and other books of interest to new Latino residents in the face of public pressure. In Gwinnett County, GA, “although the Spanish adult fiction is popular — 40% of the 798 works were checked out last week, compared with 37% of the overall collection of 859,699 books — Lloyd Breck, chairman of the library board, said the decision to stop buying such books was ‘very simple.’ The budget would not accommodate every foreign language, he said, and the board did not want to privilege one language over another.”

-jmc