The Real ID Act is a law signed by President Bush in May 2005, which, if it is accepted by and carried out by the states, would turn state driver’s licenses into a genuine national identity card and impose numerous new burdens on taxpayers, citizens, immigrants, and state governments.
What would the Real ID Act do?
Real ID would force the states to standardize driver’s licenses cards across the nation into a single national identity card and database. It does this by stipulating that state driver’s licenses and state ID cards will not be accepted for “federal purposes” – including boarding an aircraft or entering a federal facility – unless they meet all of the law’s numerous conditions, which include:
* Standardized data elements and security features on the IDs
* A “machine readable zone” that will allow for the easy capture of all the data on the ID by stores or anyone else with a reader
* The construction of a 50-state, interlinked database making all the information in each person’s file available to all the other states and to the federal government
A requirement that states verify the “issuance, validity and completeness” of every document presented at motor vehicles agencies (usually called “DMVs”) as part of an application for a Real ID card
What is the status of Real ID?
The Real ID Act has been passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush. But its acceptance in the states is far from assured. And the states have just three years – until 2008 – after enactment to come into compliance, or their citizens’ driver’s licenses will no longer be accepted for federal purposes. But the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must first complete work creating regulations that spell out in more detail exactly what the states must do to make compliant IDs. Those regulations are not expected until the summer of 2006 at the earliest – leaving the states even less time to complete the complex and gargantuan overhauls the legislation requires.
If the battle in Congress is over and the legislation has been passed, why is it still controversial?
There are several reasons the Act remains controversial.
1. The Act was not passed through a true democratic process. It was slipped through Congress in May 2005 in a “must-pass” Iraq War/Tsunami relief supplemental bill, as part of a deal reached between the powerful Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R, Wis.) and the Congressional leadership. There was no time for sufficient consideration of the Act and its sweeping implications; in the Senate, there was not even a single hearing held on the Act. The result is that Real ID lacks the legitimacy that comes from having been studied, debated, considered, and directly voted upon by Americans’ elected representatives.
2. The game is not over, it has just moved into the states. Although the Act was passed by Congress, Real ID cannot go into effect without a multitude of actions in the states. State legislatures must appropriate money and, in most cases, change state laws. State executives must remake or build anew all the administrative machinery required to comply with the Act’s numerous mandates. And a lot of people at the state level do not like what they see.
3. Broad interest-group opposition. Opponents range from privacy and civil liberties organizations like the ACLU to conservative groups to immigration groups.
4. It’s a bad Act. Most fundamentally, the Real ID Act has sparked opposition because it would not be good for our country.
The opposition to Real ID is broad and deep, and despite its passage by Congress, there remains an excellent chance that it will be reversed in part or in whole.
Why is Real ID bad for our country?
Simply put, Real ID would offer significant costs and disadvantages without any corresponding advantages:
* By definitively turning driver’s licenses into a form of national identity documents, Real ID would have a tremendously destructive impact on privacy.
* The Act would impose significant administrative burdens and expenses on state governments, and would mean higher fees, longer lines, repeat visits to the DMV, and bureaucratic nightmares for individuals.
* Yet, it would not be effective at increasing security against terrorism or bring any other benefits which would justify those costs.
What burdens would it impose on state governments?
Real ID would significantly strain state governments. Among the most significant burdens:
* It would require the states to remake their driver’s licenses, restructure many of their computer databases and other systems, create an extensive new document-storage system, and considerably expanded their security measures.
* It would require the states to set up an interstate data-sharing network, which would also require complex administrative, technical, and security measures.
* It includes a devilishly difficult mandate that states verify the “issuance, validity and completeness” of every birth certificate, immigration document, utility bill, and any other document presented at DMVs as part of an application for a Real ID card.
* Yet, it leaves the DMVs with no way to compel utility companies or other document issuers to cooperate with that verification.
* It would require states to expand their DMV payrolls, initiate or expand employee training in such areas as security, document verification, and immigration law, and initiate or expand security clearance procedures for their workers.
Many in state government are saying that it would be simply impossible to comply with Real ID by the Act’s deadline in 2008.
What burdens would it impose on individuals?
Real ID would mean higher fees, inconveniences, and bureaucratic nightmares for individuals.
* Higher fees. Because the Act’s mandates would cost states billions of dollars that Congress is not paying for, fees on individuals applying for driver’s licenses would inevitably rise, perhaps steeply. State taxes might also go up.
* Worse service. Because of the new document requirements for individuals, the labor-intensive complexities involved in verifying those documents, and the need for DMVs to reprocess the bulk of the population that already has driver’s licenses, individuals would be likely to confront slower service, longer lines, and the need for repeat visits to the DMV.
* Bureaucratic problems. The complicated yet often ambiguous maze of requirements created by the Act would throw many unlucky individuals into a bureaucratic quagmire as they try to overcome inflexible verification requirements, bureaucratic errors or mismatches, lost documents, unique circumstances, or other problems. Some individuals, inevitably, would find themselves unable to obtain these new identity papers.
These kinds of problems would be significant for anyone. In addition, for many low-income workers for whom taking off time from work is difficult or expensive, the need for repeated trips to the DMV (and to other agencies such as registrar’s offices in search of birth certificates) would be an even greater burden.
What about people who don’t have driver’s licenses?
Millions of Americans do not have driver’s licenses. Out of a population of 290 million residents, there are only 194 million licensed drivers. In addition to millions of children and teenagers, the elderly are particularly likely to lack licenses. An estimated 36 percent of Georgia residents over age 74, for example, lack driver’s licenses.[1]
By creating strict new identity requirements for federal identification and, inevitably, expanding them over time to cover a growing list of purposes, Real ID would force the people in this population to figure out a way to jump through the bureaucratic hoops required to get compliant identity documents – and leave DMVs struggling with how to process them.
What about people who don’t have birth certificates?
In some cases, individuals would not be able to obtain birth certificates, or the documents they have in hand upon arriving at the DMV would not be able to be verified.
* Over the decades, records are lost through fires, floods, and disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
* Documents can be rendered suspect due to fraud or malfeasance. In 2004, for example, thousands of Hudson County, NJ residents received word that their birth certificates had been declared invalid because of an ongoing fraud investigation at the County Clerks’ office. [i]
* Over 30 million people in the U.S. are foreign-born, and many of them were born in remote undeveloped nations or other places where no birth records are kept, or in places (such as what is now North Korea) where any records might be difficult or impossible to obtain.
* Some people are not sure when or even where they were born.
It is far from clear what would happen to such people.
Real ID is silent on how such individuals should be handled, so DMVs would need to figure out if they would simply be denied identity papers, or if their applications could be processed in some other way consistent with the Act.
What effect would Real ID have on legal immigrants?
Real ID specifically targets immigrant drivers, and that group would be among those hardest-hit by the Act. The Act bars states from issuing a Real ID to any non-citizen who cannot prove that they are in an enumerated lawful immigration status through verified documentary evidence; fails the database check; or cannot prove their identity because they rely on foreign documents other than an official passport.
Real ID would turn DMVs into sub-branches of the immigration service, forcing clerks to try to decide who can and cannot be given a license – despite the complexity of our immigration laws, which rivals that of our tax code, and the numerous legal categories that allow an individual to obtain legal status in the United States, and the even greater number of documents that verify that status. Training for motor vehicles employees could not possibly cover all of the technicalities of the immigration laws. And immigration databases are notoriously incomplete and error-ridden and might fail to verify the status of people who are in fact legally present. And many non-citizens who have lawful status, particularly refugees, might be unable to obtain federally-qualified licenses simply because they do not have official passports from their home countries.
What would happen to those who cannot get a Real ID?
It is unclear, but life would become tougher and tougher for them.
Some states might create a “second class” driver’s license that they can provide to those who can’t meet the requirements for getting a Real ID. These licenses would likely be viewed as a badge of real or suspected illegal-immigrant status, and trigger suspicion by law enforcement officers, government agencies, employers, landlords, financial institutions, utilities, and others who demand ID.
But whether or not they obtain second class licenses, those who cannot get Real ID-compliant identity documents could in theory be left unable to fly on commercial aircraft, enter federal facilities such as courthouses or office buildings, or even possibly get a job legally.
Furthermore, the list of activities for which these IDs are required is sure to expand, if the current mindless trend of seeking security through identity papers is not reversed. In fact, the Real ID Act explicitly says that Real IDs shall be required not only for activities like boarding aircraft, but also for “any other purposes that the Secretary [of Homeland Security] shall determine.”
How much would Real ID cost?
The short answers is that at this point, no one knows.
The ACLU has produced a template that outlines many of the factors that must be taken into account by a state in estimating the costs it would face in coming into compliance with Real ID. However, existing technology standards, state administrative structures, and laws within the different states vary widely, with the result that Real ID would prove even more expensive for some states than for others, and no one has actually performed a comprehensive national study of those costs.
However, state officials in Washington State have put together an estimate for the Act’s 5-year cost in their state, which they estimated to be $251 million. Virginia officials also did an estimate, which they put at $232 million. By extending those estimates to the rest of the states, we can obtain a ballpark estimate for the national expense of implementing this legislation.
That basic estimate indicates that Real ID’s total cost to the states would be between $9.1 billion and $12.8 billion.
This is of necessity a crude estimate of the Act’s costs, but until a detailed, comprehensive study is performed that looks closely at the full range of known factors, this is the best we have.
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full at link
<http://www.realnightmare.org/about/2/>
The national cost of this unfunded mandate has been estimated to be around 11 billion dollars. Needless to say, many State governments are disturbed by such a dramatic financial and bureaucratic burden.
Track States' legislative responses to REAL ID here -
<http://www.realnightmare.org/news/105/>
Other info sources -
Wikipedia article ("neutrality disputed", of course) -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act>
The Act itself (H.R.418)
Text of all threee versions
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.418:>
Text of version H.R.418.RFS
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c109:3:./temp/~c109JAAejK::>
.d.