Friday, April 27, 2012
With the Supreme Court taking up Arizona's "show me
your papers" immigration law, we're once again thrust into a useful debate
over the role of the government and the obligations of the citizen -- and
non-citizen. Rather than come at it from the usual angle, I thought I'd try
something different.
If there were one thing I could impress upon people about
the nature of the state, it's that governments by their very nature want to
make their citizens "legible."
I borrow that word from James C. Scott, whose book
"Seeing Like a State" left a lasting impression on me. Scott studied
why the state has always seen "people who move around" to be the
enemy. Around the world, according to Scott, states have historically seen
nomadic peoples, herdsmen, slash-and-burn hill people, Gypsies,
hunter-gatherers, vagrants, runaway slaves and serfs as problems to be solved.
States have tried to make these people stay in one place.
But as Scott examined "sedentarization" (making
mobile people settle down), he realized this practice was simply part of a more
fundamental drive of the state: to make the whole population legible to the
state. The premodern state was "blind" to its subjects. But the
modern state was determined first to see them, and then organize them. This is
why so many rulers pushed for the universal usage of last names starting around
1600 (aristocrats had been using family or clan names for centuries already).
The same goes with the push for more accurate addresses, the standardization of
weights and measures, and of course the use of censuses and surveys. It's much
easier to collect taxes, conscript soldiers, fight crime and put down
rebellions if you know who people are and where they live.
Perhaps the most obvious means of making the populace
legible is the identity card or internal passport. The history of the identity
card is a fascinating and shockingly complex one. For instance, did you know
that identity cards were seen as a war on bigamy in many countries?
Opponents of the Arizona immigration law like to conjure
scenes from Nazi Germany, with the Gestapo asking, "Ihre papiere,
bitte" ("Your papers, please"). And it's indisputably true that
police states, from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to Castro's Cuba and the
North Korea of the Kims, have a deep relationship with the identity card for
obvious reasons. But German officials were saying "Ihre papiere,
bitte" long before anyone heard of the Nazis.
The United Kingdom has debated the merits of identity
cards several times over the generations. During World War I, Britain's
National Registration was hugely controversial because it was seen as too
"Prussian." A generation earlier, the Prussians, under Otto von
Bismarck, had famously created the first modern administrative state, which
included the precursor to America's Social Security system and what today might
be called "jobs programs." The Prussians also pioneered the public
school system in order to make the people more legible to the state -- imposing
common language, political indoctrination and the like.
A system of reliable ID was necessary for conscription
and internal security -- government's top concerns -- but it was also necessary
to properly allocate the benefits and jobs the state doled out in order to buy
popular support, and to enforce school attendance.
And this brings me to our current debate over Arizona's
immigration laws. Opponents like to conjure the police-state association of
"Ihre papiere, bitte." I think that's wildly exaggerated (and so do
several Supreme Court justices, apparently). But as someone who's against a
national ID card, I'm sympathetic to the concern nonetheless. The Constitution
lists three federal crimes -- treason, piracy and counterfeiting -- but today
we have more than 4,500 federal crimes, all because the government in
Washington wants to make the American people more legible. I don't want to make
that easier with a national ID card.
But what I wish liberal opponents would understand is
that in a society where the government "gives" so much to its
citizens, it's inevitable that the state will pursue ways to more clearly
demarcate the lines between the citizen and the non-citizen.
Most (but by no means all) conservatives I know would
have few problems with large-scale immigration if we didn't have a welfare
state that bequeaths so many benefits on citizens and non-citizens alike. I
myself am a huge fan of legal immigration. But if you try to see things like a
state for a second, it's simply unsustainable to have a libertarian immigration
policy and a liberal welfare state. Ultimately, if you don't want cops asking
for your papers, you need to get rid of one or the other.
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