Jophiel wrote:
The catalyst for this thread was a drive time radio show the other day in which the (typically conservative) host expressed dismay that so many people would willingly trade up this information and go this route. He kept hearing from people who a month ago were screaming about the intrusive US Census asking if you're a white guy or a black guy and who now would be first in line to hand over this information to the US government if it meant getting rid of the illegal immigrants.
You're certainly going to get a range of ideas tossed out there when you open yourself up to random callers, but that's really kind of a misrepresentation of the primary conservative position on this. The privacy issue isn't the primary reason conservatives have issues with the Census. It's what the census data is used for, and the degree to which it can be manipulated to support or funnel social spending. It's that spending they have issues with, and the data collected via the Census and the additional questions have to do with that. It's not just about privacy. Heck. It's not even primarily about privacy.
It's also not just about illegal immigrants either. The reason why conservatives tend to support the idea of a national id card is an outgrowth of the same position I just mentioned above. What they don't like the most is the idea that the fruits of their labors are going to be taken from them and used to provide services for other people who didn't do as much or work as hard as they did. Right or wrong, one of the perceived areas where this is happening is in the area of illegal immigration. There's a perception on the right that the left supports illegal immigration, not because they care at all for the conditions of the immigrants, but because they can use their numbers to manipulate census results which in turn help them build support for their social spending agenda, and if those numbers aren't enough, as long as they keep identification methodologies as vague as possible, they can engage in voter registration fraud and potentially influence election outcomes to benefit them.
At the very least, they can generate numbers of people who may or may not be citizens but who "count" for purposes of protests and such. Public perception is swayed by what they see on their TVs.
The rationale for a national id card is that we already have social security numbers, and we already have drivers licenses, and we already have a number of other processes which track our identity, all of which already intrude on our privacy, and all of which benefit the causes to which the left wants to track people, but none of which do the two things that conservatives care about: Verify identity when voting, and verify citizenship status.
It's a bit more complex than just whether someone is "for privacy". Conservatives tend to understand that privacy rights derive from property rights. It's somewhat silly to protect information privacy at the cost of property. From a conservative point of view, this is completely backwards. Privacy isn't just about the government not collecting data about me. It's about the government not taking and using my property without my permission. That property includes my own papers of course, but that's only part of the issue. You can't just look at one part and ignore the rest, yet that's the argument being presented.
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He cornered one caller who was advocating thumbprints and asked if he'd be in favor of a DNA database and the caller enthusiastically agreed. The host was baffled, saying it was as though these people all forgot any of their reservations about the federal government and any arguments such as "It could be used against us when the revolution comes" in their fervor to get rid of a particular group of people.
That's twice you presented the same complex question in your statement. You are making assumptions about objective which I disagree with. Conservatives do not want to "get rid" of illegal immigrants. They want them to obtain legal status. Conservatives overwhelmingly don't have a problem with workers coming from Mexico and working in the US. They want them to do it legally.
The host was "baffled" because he (like a lot of conservative pundits on the radio unfortunately) tends to parrot the words and the ideas, but doesn't understand the reasoning behind them. They tend to make the same broad brush mistakes about their own "side" that the liberals do. It's one of the things that really bugs me when listening to such shows. It's bad enough when the liberals in the media don't get it, but a good number of the conservatives don't either.
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I'm not saying anything about anyone here (yet... heh) but the recent spat about "liberty" being more of a talking point than an actual ideal for most people kind of tied into the whole thing and got me curious.
Why not trust that people can make their own decisions about this? I've repeatedly talked about the difference between being willing to give up a small amount of liberty to protect a larger amount versus having someone just force it on you anyway. This is the same thing. A whole lot of conservatives are ok with providing some personal data related to identification, if that means that *everyone* has to have said id in order to qualify for all the stuff their tax dollars are paying for. Of course, they'd rather not provide those services at all, but having long since lost that battle, it's not unreasonable for them to take the position that at least people who aren't here legally shouldn't get them, and that we should use said id to prevent voter fraud.
I've been pretty busy the last few days, so I haven't had any time to look into this myself. I am interested in what's motivating this on the Dem side. They're usually very much opposed to national id, so I'm suspecting that there's a catch here somewhere, or they're doing this purely to create a wedge issue. Not really sure of anything except that Democrats historically have not wanted national IDs. IDs for specific programs they're doing? Absolutely. But one that can be used as a generate identification and could be used to establish citizenship and voter id? They've opposed that for a long time...
