Underlying this overall contradiction, of course, is the obvious fact that millions of people leave Mexico and other parts of the world to come to the U.S. to work because living conditions and/or economic opportunities at home are such as to incline them strongly to move to the U.S., legally or otherwise.
One way to resolve this situation might be to encourage by all legal political, cultural, and economic means the commercial development and right to self-determination of the peoples and economies of the countries that are now sending so many of their
A Mexican economy that was able to fully utilize the energy, creativity, intelligence, and determination of the people who are now bringing these attributes to the work they are doing north of the border, work most of them have to risk their lives to be able to get, would be an economy that was not propelling millions of undocumented immigrants across that border. But it would also not be an economy providing the U.S. with millions of low-cost workers.
Eliminating these disparities in political freedom and economic opportunity elsewhere would do a great deal to remove the causes leading to the various moral dilemmas and political firestorms surrounding the illegal presence in the U.S. of these economic immigrants, including their rights or lack thereof to standard identification documents, and the impact their presence is having on education, the delivery of health care services, and culture generally within the U.S.
Again notwithstanding the proposed declaration of the U.S. Congress that a Social Security card that could not be forged, that was machine-readable and that could be checked instantly against a database of those legally entitled to be employed would not be a national identity card, if the REAL Social Security Card Act does become law it might make sense to integrate the new REAL ID-compliant driver's licenses and the REAL Social Security cards into a single machine-readable smart card with all the requisite data and all the anti-counterfeiting technologies available now and in the future.
It might also be a good idea to load an encrypted and powerful "digital certificate" on each of these integrated ID cards, so that the cards could be used, in conjunction with a "public key infrastructure" (PKI), not just for the government to keep track of the people, but for the people to use in keeping track, in fact controlling, the policies and procedures that the government uses to keep track of the people and, in fact, to use in determining everything else it does, or doesn’t do, in the name of the people and on their behalf, under the rubric of "representative democracy."
Towards the end of the last century, as the Silicon Valley bubble was peaking, it was suggested in an article entitled
"Jump-Starting the Digital Economy (with Department of Motor Vehicles-Issued Digital Certificates)", that it would give a boost to commerce in the U.S. and globally to provide every holder of a driver's license with a smart card to put that license on and a digital certificate that would allow him or her to unambiguously and securely identify him- or herself to whatever company or government agency with which they wanted to do commercial or official business.
This suggestion was part of a larger e-politics and e-government agenda that sought to empower the population digitally so that the ability of the Internet to disintermediate transactions of all kinds, including political transactions, could be harnessed in the cause of more efficiency and more democracy in the political process.
Remote official voting over the Internet was a cornerstone of this agenda. Also figuring prominently in it was the idea of
Smart Initiatives, whereby registered voters could sign official initiative, referendum, and recall petitions easily and securely online, enabling causes and proposals without big money behind them to find their way to the ballot, while facilitating and reducing the cost to government agencies of checking the validity of the affixed signatures, letting these agencies check ALL the signatures on ballot proposals faster, at lower cost, and more accurately than they can now randomly check a small percentage of those signatures manually.
Who should rule in a democracy?
These proposals were never taken up by the organs of representative government, partly because of then (and possibly still) unresolved technical issues in the complicated world of online identification and authentication. But mostly they never came to fruition because of the very real likelihood that they would have (and still could) disintermediate political parties and politicians into deep irrelevance, a fate upon which all incumbent elected officials, whatever their party or ideology, seem to agree is devoutly to be avoided at any and all costs, for example, at the cost of preventing the people from having a real say in doing "the people's business."
If the federal government is going to require every person who drives or works in the U.S. to carry a high-tech "not-a-national-ID" card connected to a universal database able to validate instantly their right to drive, work, or even be, in the U.S., then it seems only fair that the same level of technology this arrangement relies on for its ability to monitor and control the population ought also to be leveraged in a way that allows those legally entitled to be, work, and drive in the U.S. to use the power of the Internet to propose and vote on legislation and candidates for office, register or change their party affiliation, recall office holders, and generally manage their own political affairs with the same flexibility, speed, and comprehensiveness that their representatives want to use to keep track of them and what they're doing.
As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1858:
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."
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