Minneapolis ponders new ID Card for Illegal Immigrants and other “Constituencies”

Minneapolis City Council announced a new plan to introduce municipal ID cards after increasing pressure from illegal immigrant advocacy groups in the state of Minnesota.

In general, the city ID card seems to be the latest bad idea proposed and implemented by left-wing city governments in their crusade for open borders.

The card is targeted at illegal immigrants

While the City Council and the Mayor may attempt to deflect on this issue, the same residents who can get a Minnesota State ID card would be able to obtain the municipal ID.

The only difference with this card is that it would allow illegal immigrants to have a valid form of ID, as well.

As noted in the Star Tribune:

“This municipal ID is being designed in a way that meets a lot of constituency needs, not just the immigrant community needs” said Alondra Cano, a City Council member and the chief sponsor of the municipal ID ordinance. “We are talking about homeless people, young people, elderly people, the GLBTQ community.”

If this is actually the case, why invest in a new card at all?

Per the Star Tribune article, the department that would potentially be responsible for the program has requested $250,000 to implement it.

If the city felt it was truly important for allegedly underserved individuals to obtain a Minnesota ID, the city could easily find a way to pay for those rather than coughing up a quarter of a million dollars to create an entirely separate process and form of ID.

The card would be voluntary

Though, as you can read in this MinnPost article, activists are already pushing for others to obtain a municipal ID so as to obfuscate the fact that almost all holders of the card would otherwise be illegal immigrants.

The fact that basically anyone using the card would be profiled as an illegal immigrant would seem to be the biggest drawback to it, if one were a supporter of the idea. With this negative perception in mind, Chicago spent many months finding a way around it by making their ID card a three-way combination of an ID, a library card and a Ventra transit pass.

But that could be difficult in Minneapolis, because the library system is controlled by the County, and the transit system is controlled by the Met Council. (Then again, those bodies have been captured y the left, too.)

I can’t imagine what would make the new ID a worthwhile endeavor if the goal is to enforce the law.

As I noted above, the city could easily pay for “vulnerable” populations to obtain a state ID, if that is what was truly the problem.

But the real goal is open borders, and #Resistance at all costs.

The City asserts that the new card will benefit marginalized populations, and left-wing ideology mandates the state do more to support such individuals, i.e. make it easier for them to access more benefits.

Why not simply have the state create a new ID card for anyone on a state benefit program, along the lines of the Chicago combination card?

This could build on the Electronic Benefit Cards used in the majority of states (including Minnesota), while adding Child Care Assistance Program dollars, housing assistance, or even transit assistance funding for some of the innovative test programs using Lyft and Uber.

Not only would this solve the alleged problem of a lack of suitable ID’s for various people, it would simplify the transfer of benefit funds to users while centralizing the tracking to the dollars. The program would likely pay for itself in short order, as it would create a single source of data on benefit programs, making it easy to get a complete picture of “anti-poverty” spending and simplifying the exposure of programs to the various forms of fraud that occur.

It would also, of course, inhibit the ability of illegal immigrants to access such programs.

But I somehow doubt the Mayor will buy that idea, even if it saved his Minneapolis tax payers $250,000.