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I can provide my perspective on it. I think some of these arguments I sympathize with more than others, although I probably do sympathize with all of them. One reason is that it is extremely difficult in practice to get an ID for some persons, especially the unhoused and transient. These discussions often come around to some hypothetical solution for these individuals, but in practice I doubt that they would work. Bureaucratic obstacles tend to grow, not shrink, when anything is implemented, and even more so if you consider implementation at the local level, inevitable tolls in the form of administrative fees, etc. In many of these cases it might be impossible for someone to provide necessary documents to get an ID, and they are at much greater risk of threat and so forth. I have just about every form of federal ID you can have and I feel like it's too much of a pain. I can't imagine someone who is homeless dealing with this nonsense. A second reason is that an argument can be made that a fundamental bedrock principle should be innocent until proven guilty. If you apply this to issues of citizenship or voting eligibility, or whatever, this implies the burden is on the state to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that you are not a citizen, or eligible for voting, not the other way around. I should not have to provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for basic rights ennumerated by the Constitution; the state should have the burden to deny it. Regardless of the costs of obtaining an ID, it flips the evidentiary burden from the state to the person (who presumably should be innocent by principle). A third reason is concerns about abuse. This has maybe been lost a bit to time but many of these discussions started post 9/11 and at the time it was pointed out that if you take legal jurisdiction of border authorities seriously, they have a lot of leeway over areas nowhere near the border. The concern is that if you institute a national ID, just becomes a target of abuse for corrupt government officials, or alternatively, another target for criminals engaging in identity theft and so forth. I think overall the question is, what is the real evidence for violations of the law that might be prevented by having a national ID, and what are the actual harms associated with those violations. In reality both of those questions are "negligible". When you introduce cost-benefit considerations I think the needle moves even further away from national ID requirements. |