Real ID’s driver’s license provisions, however, “will affect everyone, citizens and noncitizens alike,” Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Washington Post. “I think citizens are going to be surprised at how burdensome this is on them.”

Applicants for a driver’s license will now need an authentic copy of their birth certificate, which must be verified by the Department of Motor Vehicles, along with other identification like Social Security numbers and utility bills.

In recent decades the U.S. rulers have moved step by step toward instituting a national identification system based on Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses. In all but 11 states a Social Security number is a requirement for receiving a driver’s license today. The Real ID Act would make driver’s licenses from these 11 states invalid for federal identification purposes, and impose federal requirements to standardize the issuing of licenses.

Any form of national ID means that workers who are stopped by cops, go to rent an apartment, apply for a job, or board an airplane will be tracked more easily through a nationwide system, allowing the police to follow the movement and history of any individual. Such an ID gives the government and the employers another tool to potentially victimize unionists and others who find themselves out of favor with the powers-that-be.

Among the imperialist governments in Europe, seven—those of France, Belgium Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal, Germany, and Spain—require citizens to have a national identification card. In the latter two cases the identification card systems were introduced under fascist regimes and never repealed.

Tokyo made an attempt recently to institute a national ID card in Japan, but in the face of opposition the effort fell flat. The Japanese government decided to institute a card on a voluntary basis. Only 250,000 Japanese citizens applied for it, however, far short of the government projection of 3 million.

The governments of Canada and the United Kingdom have been considering such systems but have not yet put one into place. A bill is under discussion currently in the British Parliament to institute such an ID. A serious fight developed in Australia over efforts to impose a national ID card in the 1980s. A similar struggle followed in New Zealand, forcing the scrapping of the government’s plans to introduce the “Kiwi card.”

Some version of a national ID system exists in many semicolonial countries.  
 
Police harassment, blacklisting
In addition to tracking movements, such identification systems have been used to facilitate state and employer blacklists, measures to enforce second-class status for oppressed nationalities and other sections of the population, and other moves to further exert state control over the population.

In France, Algerians and Africans face routine harassment from the police in the form of identification checks. In Germany, workers are required to show the boss an identification card with a number in order to gain employment. The state identification system is used to limit access to public housing for Turkish and other immigrant workers.

While these are normal discriminatory practices under bourgeois democracies, in Europe and elsewhere these identification systems have been part of enforcing broader assaults on sections of the population by dictatorial regimes. Under a military government in Greece, for example, which was in power between 1967 and 1974, the national ID card was used to blacklist communists and other opponents of the regime.

Moves to further curtail the rights of undocumented workers in the United States are part of the Real ID bill and similar measures that have been passed on a state level. Requiring workers to provide valid Social Security numbers or other state-issued identifiers in order to qualify for a driver’s license imposes a burden on workers who need to drive to get to work but do not have the proper documents to do so.  
 
Deportations of immigrants decline
These moves are aimed at reducing the rights, not the numbers, of immigrants living and working in the United States. Today, the foreign-born population in the United States stands at nearly 36 million. That is more than 12 percent of the population—double the rate 25 years ago.

The number of undocumented workers living and working in the United States has grown to nearly 11 million, an increase of half a million annually over the past five years. More than 6 million of those workers came from Mexico.

As foreign-born workers in the United States have become more integrated into society and the economy, the number of people deported from the United States has declined. In 1997, more than 61,000 people were deported from the United States. Last year the figure was just under 50,000.

What has tightened is control of U.S. borders. The number of people ruled inadmissible before entering the United States increased from 53,000 in 1997 to 153,000 last year, and the numbers of border cops were beefed up. This shift, however, is not aimed at stemming the tide of immigration.

Over the past two decades, finance capital has penetrated into native agricultural markets and the price of basic commodities like coffee, cacao, and sugar have plummeted—destroying the livelihoods of millions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa and forcing peasants to move to the cities and become part of the proletariat. According to the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency, the world working class has grown by 400 million in the last decade, from 2.4 billion to 2.8 billion.

At the same time, class exploitation by local capitalists and landlords, increased by the debt bondage imperialism imposes on the semicolonial world, has forced a larger number of these workers to seek a livelihood in the United States and other imperialist countries.

Roughly half the immigrants who moved between 1995 and 2000 from semicolonial to imperialist countries went to the United States.

For the U.S. employing class, this inflow of cheap labor has been its principal competitive edge against its rivals.

A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Immigration Reality Check,” illustrated a view shared by many in the ruling class. “So long as the U.S. shares a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, we’ll never reduce the illegal flow with punitive measures that ignore the market forces luring foreign workers here in the first place,” it said. “The best way to decrease the number of illegal crossings, while also satisfying our economic needs, is to give immigrants more legal ways to come.”

Many in the ruling class also oppose new regulations that make it harder for undocumented immigrants to get a driver’s license. Judge Karen Smith of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, for example, ruled May 10 that New York State motor vehicle authorities may not deny driver’s licenses to immigrants who cannot provide residency documents. Smith said the N.Y. Department of Motor Vehicles exceeded its authority when it imposed such restrictions in 2002.  
 
 
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