The Sunday Times:

EVERY foreigner in America, including British visitors, would be required to carry an ID card bearing photograph and fingerprints under plans drawn up by Rudolph Giuliani, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination…

…“If you don’t have that card, you get thrown out of the country,” Giuliani said. He intends to call it a Safe card (for secure authorised foreign entry)…

Mr Giuliani has got to be kidding on this one.  Yet again, we are going to over-bureaucrat, intimidate and stick it to law-abiding people usually possessing more ID than anyone knows what to do with, who enter the U.S. as tourists with every intention of leaving?  For in addition to holding their machine readable (or now perhaps a biometric) passport, most approach U.S. passport control nervously, awaiting their (already required) electronic fingerprintings and sometimes terse cross-examinations, while also bearing in a pocket or purse a foreign driving license, credit cards, bank cards, check book, and even perhaps an ID card from their country of origin. 

All that most lack on their persons at that moment is probably an original of their house deed.  Likely their needing also to carry that across the Atlantic is only a matter of time.  Yes, for them, the already warm “Welcome to the U.S.” always only gets oh, so much the warmer.  

Next, how about putting some minor effort into addressing another small issue for a change?  As Pew Hispanic prominently has told us:

…Mexicans make up by far the largest group of undocumented migrants at … 57 percent of the total in the March 2004 estimates … In addition, another … about 24 percent of the total are from other Latin American countries. About 9 percent are from Asia, 6 percent from Europe…

So, of perhaps rather greater import, in case the Mayor hasn’t noticed, is if one can manage to walk in across the southern land frontier, it has evidently become that crosser’s God-given right to live in the U.S. just ’cause he darn well wants to. And perpetually weak-kneed U.S. politicians seem to think nothing of allowing that crosser that privilege . . . sans any papers period. Biometric ID cards for those people at the supposed frontier, or they “get thrown out of the country“?  It is to laugh. 

However, according to the Sunday Times, the Mayor has at least partly noticed, and . . .

…has vowed to strengthen patrols along the most porous parts of the border with Mexico and deport illegal immigrants who have been convicted of drug dealing and other crimes…

Yet what about those parts that are “porous”, but aren’t “the most porous”?  Well, those who slip in through those are only apparently to be without papers until some state, city, or locality hands them a local ID.  That ID is presumably “secured” courtesy of the “immigrants’ ” good words and disarming, “I love America” grins. 

Those ”immigrants” are then rewarded also with offerings (by both parties) of a “path to citizenship”.  Actually, “path” in that sense couldn’t be a better word.  After all, it is still impossible to walk across the Atlantic.