Papers, Please!

For the past week, Texas has been on fire. At least 1,400 families have lost their homes and pretty much everything they owned. Some of those are people I know. And the fires are still burning.

As I sit here wondering what I can do to help those friends and co-workers, I find myself fretting about important documents they may have lost. Thirty years ago, that would have been way down my list of concerns. But in this polarized, post-9/11 America, it seems you can hardly do anything without a document that verifies your right to exist.


Skeptics will say it’s been that way for a long time. A card to borrow books from the library, a membership card to buy groceries at Costco or Sam’s Club, a “driver’s license” that has morphed into an all-purpose ID that's all but required to write a check, board a plane, check into a hospital or walk into a bar.

The skeptics are right -- but it’s getting worse. On January 1, when the new Texas Voter ID bill takes effect, my driver’s license will effectively become a license to vote. At the same time, another law enacted by this year’s Legislature will make that license harder to get. From now on, anybody who goes to apply for, renew, or replace a Texas driver’s license will have to show proof that he or she is in the country legally.

The intent of this law, I suppose, is to make it harder for illegal immigrants to get around and tend to business. If the feds won’t deport them, the reasoning goes, let’s make life in America as inconvenient as possible, and maybe they’ll leave on their own.

Maybe, and maybe not. Some, I’m sure, will stick around and keep driving without a license. Meanwhile, the Lege has created extra hassles for everyone else. Texas residents who have had a driver’s license for decades will find, next time it comes up for renewal, that they have to trot out a birth certificate or green card or other proof that they’re entitled to be here.

Didn’t I show that birth certificate when I applied for my first license at age 16? Citizenship wasn’t an issue then, but I had to prove I was old enough to drive. And didn’t the Department of Public Safety take my thumbprints and attach them to my permanent record?

Oh, well. In my particular case, those are rhetorical questions. I happen to know where my birth certificate is, and furthermore, I have a passport. I’ll just have to remember to take it with me when I go to stand in line at the DPS.

There are plenty of Texans who don’t have those documents handy. I find it sadly ironic: aside from the undocumented immigrants, the folks that will be most inconvenienced by this law are natural-born Americans who don’t travel much.

Think about it:

• If you’re a citizen of some other country, here on a student or worker visa, I suspect you keep that visa close at hand.
• If you’re a legal resident alien, I’ll bet you know where your green card is.
• If you were born in some other country and became an American by choice, especially if you were old enough to sign your own naturalization papers, you probably know where you put them.

So I’m thinking mostly of fellow Texans who were born in the USA, never lived anywhere else, and have never even left the country on vacation. People who grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, who had the words memorized long before they gained the grammar skills to sort out what they meant. People who’ve sung along with the national anthem at countless football games and 4th of July parades, voices cracking on “the rockets’ red glare.” People who’ve raised kids, gone to PTA meetings, cared for aging parents, held garage sales and lived in several different houses. Who don’t have a clue where their birth certificates might be, and never thought much about it, because it never entered their heads that anyone would question their right to be here.

And now there are hundreds of Texans who may have had those documents two weeks ago, but didn’t have time to save them before their homes and all their belongings were reduced to ashes.

Sure, those papers can be replaced. It’ll take a bit of time and money. I’m hoping those folks took their driver’s licenses, at least, when they fled their burning neighborhoods. I hope they won’t need to renew them until they get their papers straightened out.

... or if they do, maybe our Department of Public Safety will cut ‘em some slack?