The House of Representatives approved a bill September 20 requiring all voters to show a photo ID. Nine days later the Senate voted 80-19 to build a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. The House had passed the fence bill two weeks earlier.

The newly adopted Federal Election Integrity Act requires everyone intending to vote to show a photo ID by the 2008 federal elections. By 2010 voters will be required to show their ID with proof of citizenship. Supporters of the bill called for such a measure to keep undocumented immigrants from voting in U.S. elections.

The bill builds on the 2005 Real ID Act, which requires all applicants for a driver's license to prove legal residency in the United States beginning in 2008. Under this law all licenses will indicate the citizenship status of the holder.

Twenty-four states have laws requiring voters to show some sort of identification, and seven of these require government-issued photo ID. In September, Superior Court judges in both Georgia and Missouri ruled unconstitutional state laws requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls.

In August 2005 thousands of people, the majority Black working people, marched in Atlanta to protest the Georgia voter ID law. Some noted that such restrictions on voting rights would bear down hardest on immigrants, Blacks, the elderly, and rural residents, who are less likely to hold a driver’s license or other government-issued ID.

In a related move, the Senate on September 29 allotted $1.2 billion toward the construction of a double-layer fence along one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border. The barrier would cover rural sections of the California and Texas borders and nearly the entire Arizona border.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, complained that the border measures fall "very far short of what Democrats have proposed over and over and over again."

The government of Mexico asked President George Bush to veto the fence proposal, something Bush said he won't do. Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderon said the fence "only creates migrants willing to take ever-greater risks and in consequence, probably, will produce more unjust deaths along the border."

Deaths of workers crossing the U.S.-Mexico border have nearly doubled in the last six years, to 472 in 2005.

Also on September 29, the Senate allotted funds to hire 1,500 additional Border Patrol cops and to build jails capable of holding 6,700 additional immigrants awaiting deportation.
 
 
Related articles:
Protesters in Connecticut: ‘Don’t deport day laborers!’
Protesters in California counter rightist Minutemen
How labor misleaders led ‘Yellow Peril’ campaign  
 
 
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