Coyote Blog

In the winter half the population of rural Saskatchewan is in Arizona. Of course, they don't want to immigrate because they would lose their medical care. (At least that's the way it used to be when I lived there.)

Why do the Saskatchewanians want to winter in Arizona? Even they aren't tough enough to want to spend the winter in Saskatchewan. My first car was a little British sports car. In the winter, I had to make sure it was in the correct gear to get out of the driveway because you couldn't change gears until the car had driven half a block. The tires would freeze square on the bottom. The car would thump along the street for a while until the tires warmed up a bit. Sigh; it takes me back ...

The smell of bacon lingering in the air always gives away.

Back bacon.

Oh, how cute, a private group wants to do some identity theft and they become your heroes, because they so completely totally destroy the idea that people can easily, simply prove that they legal residents of the United States of America, a sovereign nation with soveriegn borders. I sure as hell would go to all lengths required to give personal private and identity theft friendly information to any jerk who happens to ask me out on the street to prove I am a legal citizen of the United States of America.

But if a cop needed the proof, I have access to a passport, a social security card, drivers license, my birth certificate (short form), my DD 214 and my original military ID card. But I am not even going to show some punk on the street with a camera crew so much as a drivers license.

The truth is that shy of a few very special cases, every single person born in the United States of America can very easily prove they are in fact citizens. It is called a birth certificate, and in order to obtain one, to furnish to a government entity or a prospective employer is to know what county you were born in, the maiden name of your mother and your birth date and if you changed names you have the arduous task of remembering what your mother called you until you were 18 years old. Now, yes, there are the rare public buildings that burned down and took out your birth certificate situations, but my understanding is that these documents are required to be duplicated in some form (microfich?) and stored in secondary and frequently tertiary locations. So, unless the whole state burned to the ground, there should be a record somewhere of your birth.

Nice try illegal alien enabler libtardarian, but no cigar on convincing anyone with a functioning BS detector that asking for identification from people is a joke because it is hard for a private party with no need of private information to obtain proof of citizenship from random people on the street. Your webpage is really starting to become quite the joke, I really miss the down to earth Coyote Blog that actually had reasonable arguments about things instead of some anarchist wetdream jihad for borderless globe.

Oh, the good old days when no one needed ID to do anything, not to vote, not to live here, not to drive.

Cute, but stupid.

Equivalent to filming passing white Americans and opining that they might be "Christian terrorists" contemplating an attack on America and stating that this is equivalent to filming passing Muslims and wondering if they might be "Islamist terrorists" doing the same. The first is so implausible that it is ludicrous while the second, while unlikely, is a real possibility.

Coyote, you make sense on many issues, but you are a total "________" on illegal immigration (fill in the blank with an uncomplimentary descriptor). Supporting illegal immigrants when American workers are suffering such high unemployment is "worse than a crime, it is stupid." It is equivalent to a parent loving a neighbor's child more than their own. It is unnatural (even if the neighbor's child is more talented, harder working, etc.) and it insures that their own child will become dysfunctional and unhappy. Every choice we make (even refusing to choose one over the other) has consequences. We cannot treat everyone on the planet equally, we don't have the resources. We have to make choices and choosing to support your fellow Americans at the expense of foreigners is equivalent to choosing to take care of your own mother rather than taking care of your friend's mother equally well. No one (and no country) has the resources to care for every person in the world equally well. Not choosing your compatriots (or family members) over foreigners (or strangers) guarantees the collapse of the country (or the family). We don't choose our fellow Americans any more than we choose our family, but our fate is wedded to the fate of other Americans. Maybe someday (don't hold your breath) we can be citizens of the world but today we are Americans and unless we focus on helping America (and other Americans), America (and all its citizens) will suffer.

Every other society on Earth (other than the Europeans and Canadians) gets this basic truth. After 70 years of "one world" and "Kumbaya" nonsense most Westerners see themselves "above" acknowledging that the only way you can avoid having an identity separate from other nationalities (or cultures) is to surrender to them and become their inferiors. I wish it wasn't so but either we put America first or we will be the "serfs" of the Chinese, Mexicans, Russians, Muslims, etc. (whomever has the strength of will and desire to dominate us). The "tribe" is hardwired into the human brain. You can to some degree choose your tribe (although if you are obviously different, say by accent, appearance, or religion, you are at best tolerated by your chosen group, never fully accepted). Try living in Japan, Africa, or a Muslim country and see if you are really accepted. You will be tolerated, probably because you are assumed to be a "rich" westerner but they won't want you marrying their sister (especially the local elites) and you will be assumed to be "fair game" to be treated in ways that it would be immoral to treat their peers.

Treating foreigners with respect, as long as they respect our country and its laws, is moral and smart. Allowing foreigners to flaunt our laws makes us look weak and encourages others to assume they can walk all over all our laws and our citizens. Either America is strong enough to protect our borders and enforce our laws or we deserve to be conquered and destroyed by stronger neighbors (and we will be). You may not be "primitive" enough to see this simple truth, but 99% of the rest of the world sees it very clearly. Call me "xenophobic" if you will but the only reason there was a "Greek" culture is because the Greeks killed the Persians and expelled them from Greek lands. No nation that cannot defend itself survives. I want America to survive because fate made me, and my loved ones, Americans. Seems simple minded but all really important truths are simple. The smart and cultured Jews went meekly to the gas chambers because they couldn't grasp that their neighbors would murder them for being "different". When times get hard, we always rely on our family and our tribe and defend them against the "other." This is sad, as the "other" is not very different from ourselves but they will kill us simply because we are their "other," so choose: survival for you and yours or destruction and death for you and yours. We live, not in the best of all possible worlds, just in the only possible world, the one that exists now.

We have to crack down on these Canadians.

The responses from several of the people in the video were quite telling. More than one threat of violence in response to being asked for proof of citizenship, and of course "Uh oh, I know what you're getting at" at the end of the clip.

IgotBupkis - you are right about Grover Cleveland. Probably one of the last presidents to read the Constitution. He vetoed 414 bills in his first term and 170 in the second. More than all previous presidents combined. He got it, limited Government.

His comment about the American people being charitable was correct. The people actually provided 10 times the about of aid that Cleveland vetoed the aid bill. However, that was before the 17th Amendment, which started the transfer of money from the people who earned it to the Government. Let the Government do it, whatever "it" is. The people have less and less to give through charity. The best you can say about the Government filling that role is that they are inefficient. However, from my perspective it is more sinister. The Government creates dependencies and then uses tax revenue to build constituencies. Bring back Grover Cleveland, my favorite President.

Can You Prove You Are Not An Illegal Canadian Immigrant?

The thing is, the police can't walk up to random people doing random things and ask them for proof of legal residence. Further, the law say that a driver's license is sufficient evidence that the person is legal. And further...they have 24 hours to provide the documentation.

I know that you support more open borders, but I suspect that you support some form of "you must be here legally". Is it not reasonable to validate that people are legal or illegal?

I just want to point out that any argument that requires ad hominem is one that most people will flat out ignore as soon as they them pick up. Using other fallacies of argument can provoke the same response.

I personally find arguing with fallacies to be in very poor taste and I will view all uses of them as conceding the debate.

-- John O.

Gah, I hate these things.

It's just *blank* stroking-- film long enough, you'll be able to get enough three-second clips to "prove" whatever you want.

Then we get to the whole "utterly missing the point" and what the law actually requires....

Oddly enough, although I was a resident of Canada for a long time, I would have no trouble proving that I'm an American citizen.

I've found that I'm often asked to prove my identity with government issued photo ID, generally for purposes I wholly approve of, such as verification that I am entitled to use the credit-card or cheque I have just presented.

But, I've long been uncomfortable with handing over an ID document containing my current address.
I managed to get my SSN off the driver's license card long ago, but the state still loves to index it by that number in their database, which seems to be accessible by all kinds of people.

The "passport card" is just the ticket though. It is indisputably government issued photo ID, does not contain an address, and is not linked to my SSN in any database accessible to mere mortals.

This is really fucking stupid. You could easily go up to brown people and ask them the same thing, and they'd give you the same answer.

Back in the 80's my next door neighbor got deported. He worked in construction in construction. INS checked the hispanics first, but after some heckling by the workers, they checked everybody. The only one deported was the blonde, blue eyed canadian who had taken a California vacation 15 years earlier and never left.

astonerii: Do you always have your passport and birth certificate on you? Carrying your birth certificate around routinely is so unusual that a cop could consider it suspicious behavior. (As in, you're expecting to be stopped and have this easily forged document ready just in case...)

I doubt it's that difficult for an illegal immigrant to get a driver's license. IIRC, I only needed to show a birth certificate once, 40 years ago, and that was just because it was the only document I had to prove I was over 16. There's nothing out there to catch those that entered the country legally, obtained a driver's license, and overstayed their visa. Nor are DMV clerks going to catch identity theft.

Tying driver's licenses to citizenship or immigration status is a bad idea in the first place. The ostensible reason for government-issued driver's licenses is road safety. If documentation unrelated to your qualifications to drive is required, the safety function suffers. If you're going to steal someone's identity to get the license, you might as well steal an identity that passed driver's ed and skip that class...

Nor is skin color a reliable filter. We've got close to 3,000 miles of unguarded border with Canada, and most of them are white. I also knew a family of Cuban immigrants (legal, I presume) that were all red or blond haired and white skinned with freckles. Most likely their ancestors from a century or more back were Irish, but they were Cuban in culture and birth. I know there were also Irish-Mexicans and German-South Americans, so don't point at your white skin and blue eyes as proof that you didn't cross the Rio Grande illegally.