Why all Americans should have to carry ID

There's a very good reason why Americans don't carry federal identification at all times, even though other nationals often do. Constitutionally, states must honor with "full faith and credit" other states' "public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings" (Article IV), so for the most part, a state government-issued identification card has the same authority as a federal-issued one, since each state is obligated to give it the same credence they would their own. (America's extreme form of federalism is to thank.) Although there are obviously instances where this isn't necessarily true, carrying a passport around along with a state ID would be redundant in most cases within the US -- even the TSA, for example, puts a state ID on the same level as a passport.

I know this wasn't REALLY the point of this article, but it did make me wonder about the constitutional/legal issues involved.

Unfortunately there are two inescapable ugly facts here:

Unrestricted immigration and a wealthy welfare state are incompatible (at least for the foreseeable future where so much of the world's population isn't wealthy).

It takes more than boarder controls to restrain illegal immigration---well, the sorts of border controls that'll work for a country like the US (we aren't going to Berlin Wall our borders for many obvious reasons).

The problem with this idea is that it while the author proposes that "Those who fail to comply should be liable to detention until the cops who picked them up figure out if they're really true red, white, and blue Americans, no matter whether they are black, brown, white or shades in between." the reality is that black and brown people would be singled out for 'paper checks' far more than white people.

I have several German coworkers. They have (and have to carry) the national ID cards described here - they look to have been the idea behind the passport card now available from the US. There doesn't seem to be anything required for Canadians or US-ians, but I think a lot of people don't carry all their ID's all the time (unless a border-crossing is intended).

It strikes me as a reasonable argument that things should apply to all equally. Cynically, start with government officials, and then extend it to the general population once things are debugged.

This is the single dumbest thing I can recall reading on Hacker News.

This guy is insane. Why would you solve a problem with more legislation, when it can be solved with legislation already in place or by removing existing legislation.

First, we could actually deport Illegals that are already picked up by local police. We don't actually do that now.

We could also modify the Constitution and get rid of the anchor baby clause.

Why does everyone jump at giving our government more power over us to solve problems like this?