|
ID cards: the truth
Related issues |
News /
Debunking ID & "Illegal Immigration"CommentAnalysis Immigration LiesAndSpin 22 May 2006 The current media hysteria about illegal immigration has, predictably, provided a misguided boost to the idea that ID cards will somehow solve the problem. It only takes a small amount of thought to see why this just should not be so: Which government department is responsible for dealing with immigration, and also with prisons, and therefore for the incompetences in both that have come to light recently? The Home Office. Now, which government department is going to run the ID registration scheme - a hugely ambitious and costly IT project, never-before tested at such a scale, impacting on every single person in the country,? That's right, the Home Office! The ugly hatred being whipped up towards people simply for being designated "illegal" sadly seems to produced so many knee-jerk reactions advocating repressive measures. From ...Blair, under severe pressure from opposition leader David Cameron, appropriately enough described an e-Borders and ID card based Fortress Britain as the ultimate fix for illegal immigration.
And Blair actually went further than previous statements (and, indeed, the ID Cards Act he has just rammed through Parliament), saying "we need identity cards both for foreign nationals and for British nationals. If we want to track people coming in and out of our country and to know the identity of people who are here, then that is what we have to do." The Act currently specifies ID cards for citizens and for foreign nationals resident in the UK for over 30 days, but has no provision for other foreign nationals. The Government has also previously been at pains to deny claims that the ID scheme will operate as a tracking network, so Blair's use of "track" as a synonym for 'log' or 'identify' is unfortunate ...
...The Immigration and Nationality Directorate, it was revealed last week, does not currently pursue overstayers, because mysteriously, when they've tried they've generally found that they're not at their last recorded address. If they happen to trip over your aunty from Trinidad who forgot to go home they'll probably send her back, but mostly she's safe. And, irony of ironies, one sure-fire way illegal immigrants are currently snagged is if they're arrested for committing a crime. But then they don't get sent straight back, because they've got to go to prison first, and when they get out you, er, forget to send them back...
As we pointed out earlier, Mr Tony didn't get specific about how ID cards would be applied to this situation, but for the sake of argument we'll speculate a little then just pretend that It Is So. Equipped with massively extended resources and (in the case of at least one of the two organisations) a vastly increased sense of purpose and resolve, IND and police SWAT teams operate intensive ID checks, pass controls and area searches, netting large numbers of immigration offenders. Alternatively, the Government pipe-dream of ID cards becoming your 'don't leave home without it' passport to life, commonly used by individuals to validate transactions several times a day, becomes a reality, and the illegals are flagged up by the electronic national ID checking network instead.
Neither of these scenarios is particularly likely, but remember that we're just supposing, OK? Whatever, your auntie from Trinidad gets it, as part of the first wave of low-level offenders, while buying stamps at the Post Office. People with jobs that show up on the system, people not trying very hard to go missing and still using the name and papers they arrived with, all of these get caught in the early stages of the dragnet. Note that IND by its own admission goes for the easier cases where it stands a better chance of a result, and note also that in this respect, those co-operating with the system and attempting to regularise their position, rather than just going missing aren't necessarily doing themselves any favours.
The criminals, the fugitives who know you're looking for them, those who adopt false IDs, and those exist below the system's radar are all going to be a lot harder, but if the checks are intensive enough and go on long enough, then quite a lot of them can be scooped up. If, that is, the supply of new illegal immigrants can be shut off. But as we've seen, even with e-Borders fully deployed there is no obvious way that this can be achieved.
Which leaves Blair's plans to solve the immigration question through the application of IT with difficulties on several levels. The border defences themselves will be expensive to keep up, will put non-immigrant travellers through annoying hoops, but will do little to impede would-be immigrants coming in under false pretences and/or false documentation. They will give the UK a biometric database of a reasonable percentage of the future defaulters, but these can only rationally be tracked down in-country via fairly repressive controls which again will impact heavily on the rest of the population.
|
NO2ID campaign Defy ID network |
