Papers, Please! Why It's Not Even Vaguely Wrong To Ask Legal Immigrants To Carry Proof Of Their Right To Live In America.
On Meet The Press, President Trump was asked the following question about his deportation program by Kristen Welker:
"Should lawful residents of this country start carrying paperwork with them when they leave their homes?"
Trump replied
"I don't think that'll be necessary — but what you're not saying is that many people have been killed, maimed, badly hurt by illegal immigrants."
Trump’s point is that a hypothetical inconvenience to Green Card holders doesn’t “trump” the US Government’s obligation to go after illegals, who do commit lots of crime.
Which is true, but if Welker had asked me, Trump aide Stephen Miller, or one of the experts at the Center For Immigration Studies, the question "Should lawful residents of this country start carrying paperwork with them…?" we would have said “What do you mean ‘Start’?’ They should already be carrying their Green Cards, et cetera as required by law.”
There was recently a bit a social media kerfuffle about ICE allegedly checking papers in the the nation’s capital:
As Canadian journalist Mark Steyn (a legal resident himself) has been pointing out for years, if you’re a green card holder, it’s already the law that you must have your card when you’re outside your house. When Mitt Romney proposed some kind of “Alien Identification Card” as an alternative to Amnesty in January 2012, Steyn wrote:
I’ve got a card that identifies me as coming here legally. It’s called a Green Card, or “Permanent Resident Card”, and it has my “Alien Registration Number” on it. And, thanks to FDR, I’m obliged to carry it with me at all times, including when I’m strolling in the woods behind my pad here in New Hampshire.
If you look at the USCIS website, it says:
We issue a Permanent Resident Card (Green Card) to all permanent residents as proof that they are authorized to live and work in the United States. If you are a permanent resident age 18 or older, you are required to have a valid Green Card in your possession at all times.
In 2010, Arizona passed a state law, SB70, making it as state crime for a foreigner to be illegally present in Arizona, and telling police who came in contact with possible illegal aliens to ask them to show proof that they were legally present.
This was widely preferred to as the “Your papers, please!” law because of old war movies in which Nazi occupying forces are asking Resistance fighters for their identification. (It’s actually the illegals who are the occupying force here, but never mind that.)
Immigration law expert Kris Kobach wrote an op-ed in the NYT [Why Arizona Drew a Line, April 29, 2010] answering five bogus claims that opponents of the bill made.
The bogus claims were:
It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them.
“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct.
The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling.
It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license.
State governments aren’t allowed to get involved in immigration, which is a federal matter.
Regarding the part about documented immigrants being expected to keep their documents handy. Kobach reminds us that "[S]ince 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them." That’s a link to US CODE TITLE 8 > CHAPTER 12 > SUBCHAPTER II > Part VII > § 1304 § 1304. Forms for registration and fingerprinting, which dates back to the pre-Pearl Harbor administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mentioned by Mark Steyn above:
(e) Personal possession of registration or receipt card; penalties
Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d) of this section. Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.
The law is that if you're a foreigner in the US legally, whether on a Green Card, a visa, or a passport from a non-visa country like Canada, you're responsible for proving it. Why is that so hard?
Here’s more from Steyn at the time of the Arizona law:
Re Arizona’s supposed crackdown on illegal immigration, President Obama just said he objected to asking people for ID because he wouldn’t want somebody asking his daughter for her papers just because they thought she might not be a citizen. Very touching, I’m sure.
My own daughter is required by federal law to have her Green Card on her at all times, even when she’s walking in the woods behind our house. Indeed, only the other month, a snotty twerp of a Customs officer at Derby Line, Vt., threatened me that, if ICE agents came to my daughter’s school and she didn’t have her Green Card on her, they could deport her.
But then she’s merely a legal immigrant, rather than one of the sainted “undocumented.”
President Obama doesn’t seem to be aware of his own laws — even when, as in this case, they were enacted by a Democrat (FDR).
I.E. the bit from the US Code above about Alien Registration was enacted in 1940 during the run-up to WWII, which makes it not an “Nazi” measure, but an anti-Nazi measure.
Do you want know another WWII leader whose country enacted a national ID system for everyone in his country, natives and aliens both?
It was Winston Churchill, whose government maintained a system of National ID’s in Great Britain from 1939 until 1952.
Churchill abolished this in 1952, because the UK was no longer in immediate danger of invasion—unlike the US today. However, it did work—in September 1940, a German named Werner Walti was arrested in Edinburgh, Scotland, because he had (a) a foreign accent and (b) his papers weren’t right.
And the policeman who caught him wasn’t a member of the Gestapo, he was an Scottish Police Constable, named PC Grieve.
That’s why I’m a little tired of people claiming that when ICE is asking foreigners for their ID, they’re acting like Nazis.
If America is going to reverse the Great Replacement, the government is going to have to know who is, and who is not, an American.
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 | A guest post by
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I once lived in a foreign country on a student visa. I was required to carry my Visa and a copy of my passport at all times. I did and I am glad I did. I spoke the language very well but my accent marked me as a foreigner. On many occasions the police or an authority would ask to see my Visa and my passport. I happily obliged, and if I did not, I would have been detained.
I am glad that country defended itself and was wary of strangers and ensured that they were enforcing their borders and territorial sovereignty. It is always 1938 is getting tired - especially when it is used to subvert and dispossess us. We've had enough. It is time to start considering any person, journalist or otherwise, who openly advocates the violation of our immigration law as aiding and abetting foreign aliens and invaders. That is treason and they should be swiftly tried and punished for it. I probably speak for a lot of people that I am sick to death of these traitors and have run out of patience. If Trump admin people read this, take this data point as a green light to do whatever is necessary to restore our demographics and root out all who seek and act to destroy our country and our people. If we are judging you, it is a judgement that you aren't doing enough to put an end to our dispossession. Please err way on the other side of this judgement as we are counting on you and we have your back.