In Reply to: texas proves why SAVE act is so bad posted by russsmith on September 16, 2026 at 07:33:30
Like there is no place we can go and point at a line in a spreadsheet and say "that's me".
We don't have any unique identifier as citizens either. So if there are two people with the same name, you have to dig into their SSN or whatever to be able to differentiate them.
In many states today, if you have to prove your citizenship, you have no obvious way of doing this unless you've taken the effort to track down your birth certificate (which I'm sure is much harder to do for many people).
So, (a) all this talk about citizenship is only hearsay until this sh*t is fixed and we have a centralized record for citizenship that we all have free access to confirm or correct the information contained there. (b) we can all have a US citizenship number and a card that goes with it (free of charge) that we can carry around as our protection against the ICE Gestapo or any other official who'd rather act on hearsay to deport us. You either don't demand citizenship or you provide an agreed upon way to prove citizenship that does not require you to track down your birth information -- which at the end of the day is a piece of paper that shows a baby was born and not a proof that you are that baby in the first place.
Keep in mind that I did not grow up in this culture so the standard American aversion to having a citizenship ID is something I find puzzling to say the least.
Until that happens, every time one group or another tries to have it both ways, I reach for my hair to pull that I don't have much left any more.