"Papers, please! Papers, please!"

3/8/2014 • Stateless Statements

So, after 23 years of life and a two-month-long struggle trying to get it, I have finally been issued my first-ever state ID card. For me, this is a huge deal–I’ve always resisted the institution of a state-issued identification system for a variety of reasons, generally privacy-related. The idea of a scannable government barcode used to track you and your purchases, as well as to aid police in running background checks by creating a centralized pool of identities and the criminal records associated with them, has always turned me off. I’ve never understood how having one’s “papers” could be such a necessity in the “land of the free;” all I can hear when the need to check them arises is, “Papers, please. Papers, please. Vere are your papers??” like the Nazis used to do. Because I believe that all individuals are sovereign inhabitants of planet earth, and that country borders are just imaginary lines created by the state and enforced with violence, I feel as though mandatory state