Exactly. This falls under Lum’s “reasonable proof that I am in fact a U.S. citizen.”
If you claim to be a citizen and to have been born in the U.S., but you’ve got no birth certificate, you’re going to have to jump through some hoops to explain why you have no birth certificate, and/or to document that you really have lived in the U.S. your whole life.
Don’t most identity fraudsters apply with fake or stolen birth certificates, allowing them to bypass all the invasive “if you weren’t born in a hospital” questions? So the extra questions would mostly serve to inconvenience honest people.
Why would I need to document that I really have lived in the US my whole life? Last time I checked, we didn’t revoke citizenship for living elsewhere.
What happens if I don’t know who was present at my birth, or where my mother lived a year before and after I was born? Do I get deported? (Of course not: I’m white, I don’t have a funny name, and I’ve never been in a mosque.) Why not? Do I live in some sort of limbo where I’m good enough to live here and pay taxes so long as I don’t hold any inappropriate political views, but I’m not good enough to be a real citizen?
Or to give honest people who’ve been the victim of identity theft the opportunity to reclaim their identity…
White as you are, you’ll have a hard time getting a passport if there is no record of your birth in this country or of a legal adoption, and you don’t know who your parents are, or neither of your parents can show U.S. citizenship. This should not be terribly surprising.
Why not? Do I live in some sort of limbo where I’m good enough to live here and pay taxes so long as I don’t hold any inappropriate political views, but I’m not good enough to be a real citizen?
Shockingly, there are millions of undocumented immigrants who live in just such a limbo as you describe, although inappropriate political views rarely get you deported unless you are so vocal about them that your undocumented status becomes publicized.
But we are getting rather far afield from the issue of the update of one form that people who are applying for a passport and have trouble with their proof of citizenship have to fill out.
Well the underlying intention behind this is to erode, for some unknown reason, the legitimacy of the standard county issued birth certificate. The cause might just as well be some sort hold-over Republican birther in the State Dept. as it is some quasi-data mining and profiling.
How can you guys let a nice Brazil quote like that just languish?
Also, geez, my passport expires this year; better go renew it before this new stuff kicks in!
This is awesome. Are you insinuating Muslims can’t keep track of their birth certificates?
Antlers, stop. You are using logic and a sound argument to show the passport issue doesn’t apply to most people only those who are having a problem providing verification for the basic information. Since this doesn’t apply to people here, they can only be outraged by proxy - and that is the most powerful outrage the internet has to offer.
Actually Chet, who it affects is unspecified, as the article linked in the initial post would make clear – if you had bothered to read it.
Some small section of the document is set aside as extra work for those born in the US without a birth certificate, but the rest of the proposed application is still plenty onerous. Can you readily list the details every residence, employer, and school in your history? Apparently at the discretion of those handling the application you might have to. Go ahead, give it a shot; they “estimate” that it’ll only take 45 minutes, so it should be easy, right?
Furthermore, yes, I’m willing to bet it would affect me directly – and anyone else with a spouse not born in the US who is nonetheless a citizen. Gee, I wonder who’ll get to fill out the long form?
And what are they going to do when all the references listed are from someplace that doesn’t speak English, where they can’t cross-check them. Just ignore them, and make the pointlessness of the whole policy immediately apparent, or deny them categorically and thus screw over every honest immigrant?
This is nothing more than classic knee-jerk anti-immigrant xenophobia, serving no practical purpose whatsoever and freely tossing away liberty for the illusion of security.
And that’s without even getting into how the argument that something doesn’t matter because it only happens to a small group, which coincidentally doesn’t include you, is such pure and unadulterated Bullshit.
In a way this is exactly what you should be thinking(as in they want you to think). But here is the rub. Do you know 100% that if Bush had won the last election this stuff would not be happening?
Here in the uk we were all set under Tony Blair’s New Labour to get full biometric passports(how much biometric info varied from everything(eye-ball’s, finger prints and dna) to some(eye-balls only)). They told us it would help fight terrorism(yawn, that old neo-fascist lie), stop ID theft etc. Except that it wouldn’t. It really just makes your passport more valuable for criminals and the black-market in ID theft. There is no technology the criminal underworld can not also get hold of and use to compromise this information.
The main benefit of all this data is to the State, and as you are finding with this new form you need to fill out, they want a lot of personal information.
Looking back in history, whenever this kind of exercise has gone on it is rarely for the benefit of the citizen. But don’t simply blame Obama for this, i suspect the Democrats are just being used(as per agreement) to get through a bunch of nasty neo-fascist protocols, as happened under the Republicans with the Patriot Act and retinal scans etc. It is their turn(as per agreement) to enact this stuff.
You can all blame Obama(to increase his un-popularity), and then when the Republicans get in next time they will carry on the neo-fascist project, probably to protect you all from terrorists or after another terrorist attack etc(the right wing is keen on all that). This is just what we are facing in many of the democracies around the world currently.
Bush didn’t run in the last election. We have term limits. If you mean McCain, who knows? But argument from ignorance is a fallacy, so the fact that we don’t know doesn’t prove anything.
If your point is that our nation seems headed down the road to fascism, then yeah…it does at times.
No, he’s working under the assumption that the implicit use of many expanded government search and data mining abilities has been to target minorities beyond any reasonable, constitutionally defensible threshold, be it “Muslim-looking” people at airports or “Mexican-looking” people at near land borders. It’s something you can see anecdotally by visiting either of those stress points in American travel with any degree of frequency, or by tracking legislative efforts nationwide. Why would he think that Muslims can’t keep track of their birth certificates?
Antlers, stop. You are using logic and a sound argument to show the passport issue doesn’t apply to most people only those who are having a problem providing verification for the basic information. Since this doesn’t apply to people here, they can only be outraged by proxy - and that is the most powerful outrage the internet has to offer.
Is it more powerful than uninformed, reflexive internet skepticism? Stay tuned and find out!
The issue is that the burden of proof for establishing why this information is useful remains on the government agency that seeks the additional power, not individual citizens regardless of whether they will be targeted by it (which is a stupid threshold for concern, anyhow). No such case has been made, and encroachments on individual liberties are always field-tested on smaller groups without the ability to defend themselves effectively. They are welcome to present a stronger case than they have so far for why this information is something they should be privy to, and to codify specifically and publicly when it would be collected and how it would be used.
Formalizing a way to verify information on edge case application without proper documentation or other problems with the application for an initial passport is not evil. Sorry.
Fear mongering from the left is just as distateful as from the right.
It’s not fear mongering to ask for a credible rationale and evidence that this expansion of their questionnaire or any other thing they demand of people would actually be useful in their stated mission, and to ensure that the limits of such a power are clearly delineated before they come into play. That has not been done in this case, even if you bend over backwards to give them the benefit of the doubt as you have.
Take, for instance, the use of exigent letters in demanding essentially unsupervised wiretapping: it might have been reasonable in cases in the immediate wake of 9/11, but it quickly became informal routine behavior in a wide variety of cases. Federal and state agencies are good at expanding their domain, but it’s virtually impossible to get them to step back of their own volition once they become accustomed to a practice. It’s not evil, or even incompetence in most cases. It’s just an easily observable precedent that you have to account for, and no amount of false equivalencies with respect to left/right drama is going to change that.
Do you know what questions they currently ask now to verify someone’s identity applying for a passport without proper documentation? I’ll give you a hint… they are linked to here.
I do! Can you point me to where they are demonstrated to be inadequate in serving their purpose and what the evidence is that supports their expansion?
Psst… they are the same questions you are up in arms about… Formalizing doesn’t mean the same as expanding.
What is the evidence they need to be “formalized”?
A better question. You’re debating the uniqueness of a proposed bunch of ridiculous points of information gathering for some passport applicants that has, so far as I can tell, no use whatsoever in identifying international travelers and tracking them. It doesn’t matter if we’re asking who your mother’s doula was now if it’s a stupid idea to ask it in the first place. Let’s not grant chet the assumption that if we’re doing it now, then it must be a good idea.
You have no documentation. How do they verify anything about you? They need to collect tangential information they can use to verify what you state. It is crazy, since they are asking someone claiming to be an American they should just trust that - Americans (even pretend Americans) don’t lie - but there you go…