When understanding a different view, you must first have put yourself in their shoes. The article does a pretty **** job of engineering itself for people that don't want to hear people complain; it presents a well bitched about problem before it presents a route to the solution. It also tells me you didn't really read it, you just grabbed the first bit you could.
Allow me to point out what you missed:
In Texas, for example, the cost of traveling to the nearest Department of Public Safety office, Texas’ version of the DMV, can be burdensome: Of the 254 counties in Texas, 78 do not have a permanent DPS office. In some communities along the Mexican border, the nearest DPS office is between 100 and 125 miles away. And in rural communities in other states, the DMV offices are few and far between.
- Can you imagine having to travel 50-62.5 miles to get to a DPS for a pircture ID? Without a vehicle of your own?
Oftentimes, people don’t even have the money to pay for the underlying documentation needed to get a photo ID card. Getting a photo ID invariably requires proof of identification; usually, that means you need your birth certificate. But what if you don’t have your birth certificate? Then you have to contact whatever government office is in charge of that sort of thing to get a copy of it. And that can be a real pain in the *** for a lot of reasons.
- I ordered a copy of my birth certificate back in '09. I had to submit the request in the form of application, and identification. If no state identification was had, my parent had to provide their identification. So I submitted my mother's birth certificate. Imagine the pickle I'd be in had my mother not had hers.
- What happens if my birth certificate had a mistake on it? I'll tell you this, when I had to correct my social security card from Daniel to David, I also needed my mom's birth certificate.
What if a birth certificate never existed?
- No, that doesn't mean you're an illegal alien. A lot of rural folks were born on farms, or to midwives in homes.
And did you know that in 2010,
the birth certificates of all American citizens born in Puerto Rico expired? Because they did. So if you were born in Puerto Rico and you need a birth certificate, well, good luck with that. Sure, you can pay five bucks to get a new one—and let’s not forget that for some people, like low-income folks or homeless folks, even five dollars is five dollars too much—but guess what you need in order to get a new birth certificate?
One that isn't copied from the article; were you ever handed state or federally accepted photo identification without applying, paying a fee, or having paid a fee?
So help me out mang... which one of these is not a real concern? Which one of these is only hypothetical, and could never actually exist in the real world?
