Virtues of Federalism BY CHARLES EUCHNER September 27, 2007 URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/63486 When New Haven began distributingidentity cards to residents this summer, the goal was to provide a simple means for everyone to take advantage of city services and economic opportunities like bank accounts and job openings. The Elm City Resident Card cannot transform city management or give opportunity to everyone. But Mayor John DeStefano hoped that the card would give some invisible souls some access to city services, bank accounts, and employment opportunities. Mr. DeStefano hoped to improve the city's mood as well. Immigrants faced attacks from predators who knew they could not open bank accounts and so had to carry cash. A larger environment of resentment fostered "a lack of civility and order in our community," Mr. DeStefano said. The ID card has become a symbol of welcome to immigrants in New Haven. New York, San Francisco, and Washington State are considering using the New Haven model for ID cards. Symbols, though, carry different messages to different groups. As the zoologist Desmond Morris has noted, "even the thumbs-up gesture is an obscene one in some parts of the world." New Haven's ID card angered activists on both right and left, suggesting there's some merit in this symbolic gesture. Activists for border control started a mock campaign to convince illegal immigrants to flock to New Haven. The president of the Americans for Legal Immigration, William Gheen, says New Haven is committing a felony by helping illegals to get social services. "Let a few thousand more go there and use their [social] services until New Haven needs to ask for federal assistance," he said. On the left, critics have charged that New Haven is inviting cruel roundups of illegal aliens and abuses of privacy. Just days after New Haven passed the ID legislation, agents from the U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement rounded up 32 New Haven residents. Many of those arrested were wanted for deportation. An organizer for Junta for Progressive Action in the Latino neighborhood of Fair Haven, Kica Matos, pushed for the cards when immigrants were targeted for attacks, abused by slumlords, and excluded from school and other programs. Without some form of ID, aliens were invisible. The galvanizing event was the stabbing death of a Mexican man named Manuel Santiago, who was living in New Haven legally. After he cashed a paycheck from his maintenance job, he was attacked by a robber. When Santiago struggled, he was killed. Like many small and mid-sized communities, New Haven has become a destination for immigrants, both legal and illegal. Mr. DeStefano estimates that 10% of the city's 120,000 residents are undocumented. Most come from Latin America. Managing those newcomers is impossible without some system to track them. Hence the ID cards. So far, 3,000 people have obtained the cards. Aliens were the original inspiration, but the cards are available to all New Haven residents. Residents can use the cards for all kinds of city services - getting parking cards, going to Lighthouse Point Park, using the public libraries. Two banks have accepted the cards for opening accounts. Many employers also accept the cards. An alderman who voted for the ID cards, Frances Clark, says she is "amazed" at how many everyday activities require ID. "I took an Amtrak to the ferry at New London to go to Long Island," she says. "I needed an ID for both. I never paid attention to how many things - basic things - you need an ID for. It's terrible not to be able to identify yourself." Useful as they can be, ID badges and cards have posed difficult questions throughout history. In 1370, English paupers were required to "wear a sign" to demonstrate their right to beg for money or scraps of food. By the early 1800s, when the badges were thoroughly stigmatized, England revoked the requirement. Badges and ID cards usually become a tool when governments are overwhelmed by social and economic change - in periods of rapid migration, displacement, urbanization, unemployment, criminality. IDs can make management easier. But they also provoke conflict. In 1893, more than 100,000 Chinese-Americans refused to wear government-issued cards in one of the largest acts of civil disobedience of American history. New Haven has managed to get the issue exactly right. To protect its residents against raids from the feds, city officials are not allowed to ask residents about their citizenship status. Likewise, the city's police are not allowed to ask about citizenship when they intervene in disputes and make arrests. Mayor DeStefano reassures aliens fearful of being turned in: "Don't worry. We don't snitch. You are welcome here as long as you obey our local laws. We'll leave immigration issues to the feds." "We did not set out to make a grand policy statement about immigration," the mayor's director of community services, Kica Matos, says. "This is just a pragmatic response to a need." The city warns card recipients that, in the age of massive databases and conflict over immigration, they have no absolute guarantees that data will always stay private. But researchers at Yale Law School have concluded that the program is exempt from the data-sharing requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and other statutes. The Journal-Inquirer of Manchester has filed a claim with the state's Freedom of Information Commission, asking for names and other information from applications. New Haven officials have already denied an earlier request from the daily newspaper. While reserving the right to tend to its own community, New Haven's leadership seems aware of the need to let the feds do their jobs, too. One of the federal government's primary responsibilities is to protect the homeland from threats of all kinds. Congress has given the feds the tools they need, in the form of the USA Patriot Act and a number of security and border-control programs. There's a term for this division of labor - federalism. Since the New Deal, we have forgotten the wisdom of allocating different powers to the federal, state, and local governments. These days, Washington regulates virtually everything that every person, corporation, or lower-level government does. States and localities struggle to meet federal mandates - and often find themselves, uncomfortably, in the business of managing national and even international policy. Our national amnesia about the virtues of federalism undermines us in all kinds of ways - inefficiency, lack of innovation, and overreaching government at all levels. Absent a clear division of labor, issues as complex and contentious as immigration snarl everyone in impossible dilemmas. If it takes a liberal mayor of a middling city to teach the virtues of federalism, so what? It took Nixon to go to China. Mr. Euchner, the author of "The Last Nine Innings," is writing a book about suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> com. . <http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=11648958/grpspId=1705447214/msgI d=43150/stime=1190896710/nc1=3848618/nc2=3848641/nc3=4699089> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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