Halt! Your papers!

"The Wall Street Journal":

"Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain."

This is the latest incarnation of an old idea which has been implemented helter-skelter, primarily through the Social Security system and some immigrant control programs such as the "voluntary" e-Verify.

But now, led by Schumer and Graham, your senators are thinking of making it universal, something like the much-battered Real ID plan.

In the 1950s and 60, progenitors of Schumer-like statists made international reputations at the expense of a South African government which required "passes" of all black persons traveling away from their home village environs. The hysterical proto-Schumers weren't upset at the pass system as such, only that it did not apply also to whites. The Left held then, as it does now, that tyranny is acceptable if universal; only discrimination makes tyranny naughty.

(Secretly, of course, the 60s American Fabians welcomed the African diversion which permitted hours of self-righteous spewing in lieu of those politically dangerous chores of handling crucial domestic problems such as how to make Peter Paul and Mary shut up.)

You might write your senator and ask him if he'll pretty please say no. Or at least promise us the United States Internal Security and Domestic Passport Law of 2010 will not let the cops run your pass book though the health, firearms, and credit rating databases. To do that a vital government object would have to be served, such as satisfying the morbid curiosity of your demented ex-brother-in-law who owes you money and currently has a job as a Department of Homeland Security computer programmer.