IDs for the hidden

Here is a press release I received this morning (I edited out the contact info):

Roselle to Pass Municipal ID Program at City Council Hearing Tonight
Roselle Will be the Second Municipality in New Jersey to Implement  Critical Immigrant Inclusion Program

What:  In an ongoing effort to address the needs of the Borough’s immigrant community, Roselle Mayor Christine Dansereau and Borough Council will take a final vote on a program that would produce and issue municipal identification cards for all Roselle residents, and particularly for the Borough’s fast-growing immigrant community.
When: Wednesday October 21st at 7pm

Where: Roselle Borough Hall, 210 Chestnut Street, Roselle, NJ.

Who: Make the Road New Jersey members, including dozens of immigrant residents of Roselle, New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, the Roselle Office of Hispanic-Latino Affairs and other community and faith groups.

Visuals: Community residents, elected officials, small business owners, and clergy, with large signs. Immigrant comunity members available for interview.

It isn’t clear that Roselle will be the second — Asbury Park, Newark and Plainfield had either created or considered creating ID card programs and Mercer County has had a functioning system that has helped the undocumented primarily in Trenton, Hightstown and Princeton — but Roselle’s efforts mean that the program is growing.

I’ve written about this before — see my report on the Mercer County cards in NJ Spotlight — though I haven’t weighed in on where I stand. Given my reporting, which has put me in contact with dozens of undocumented Latinos mostly in Trenton, these ID programs allow the undocumented to come out of the shadows.

That’s precisely what Carmen Barbosa told me in 2013 (all of the pull quotes are from my NJ Spotlight story):

Carmen Barbosa says she has felt invisible since coming to the United States about eight years ago.

Speaking through an interpreter, the diminutive Costa Rican immigrant explained that she lacked identification, which has made it difficult to interact with the larger community.

“Everywhere you go you need an ID,” she said on a recent Saturday afternoon in the offices of the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Trenton. “I get rejected a lot, even at the hospital. I went in for an emergency and I didn’t have an ID to show.”

Critics of the ID program are concerned that IDs will make it too easy on the undocumented, which in turn will lead to more immigrants who are hear illegally coming to the state. I don’t see that happening, though I don’t know that we have strong evidence either way.

What concerns me more is that, by pushing the undocumented into the shadows, we are endangering those immigrants and the communities in which they live. Maria Juega of LALDEF told me that the undocumented “experience significant barriers to accessing necessary services, like healthcare and food security, because they lack a way to identify themselves or show themselves as a member of the community.”

The cards, she says, help residents of the communities in which they are distributed by providing them with identification that is accepted by most police departments, healthcare facilities, and banks and businesses. But the need for the cards points out flaws in both federal and state law. Only two states allow undocumented residents to get driver’s licenses, she said, and most states do not offer access to identification to the undocumented population.

ID cards like this, Juega said,

send a message to the undocumented community that the police are willing to work with them and that they can come forward when they are victims or witnesses of crime without fearing that their status will become an issue.

It’s an argument that at least some in the law enforcement community can get behind.

Pedro Medina, a Mercer County undersheriff, was the public information officer for the Trenton Police Department in 2009. He says the program made sense on a lot of levels.

“For [the Trenton police], it was good because it builds trust and confidence within the immigrant population,” said Medina, who wanted to make it clear he was only speaking as a retired police officer

“A victim is a victim,” he said. “We would try to tell them that, but there was a lot of mistrust . . .
He said that, at least at the beginning, there was a change in the immigrant community.

“Sometimes perception is greater than reality. We always wanted to work with them, but the ID showed that . . . we wanted them to report crimes and that we were there for all citizens of Trenton.”

The IDs are not a perfect solution. They are only good in a small number of jurisdictions and they are dependent on the largesse of local politicians and police. A better solution — one that recognizes that there are about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, about a half million or so in New Jersey, who are not going anywhere, who cannot be deported en masse as some might want — would be to issue driver’s licenses or driving privilege cards to anyone who can prove residence.

In the meantime, Roselle’s decision should be applauded and other communities should get on board.

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