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If they passed a "Papers please." Law in your state, would your current ID show you are a US citizen?

Asked by ETpro (34605points) December 12th, 2011

My passport expired years ago. I don’t even have a clue where it is. My State ID doesn’t state my citizenship. It just shows I live in Massachusetts. I certainly don’t carry my birth certificate around with me. With a law saying that whenever police stop you in traffic or on the street, you must prove you are a US citizen or go to jail, wouldn’t nearly all of us eventually get dragged off to the pokey till somebody can fetch our birth certificate and spring us? Some of us don’t even have a certified copy of our birth certificate. We’d have to write to our state’s hall of records.

It could be weeks or even months with the backlog they would have due to Papers Please laws before we could get our papers and get out of jail. We might lose our job or get evicted from our homes while we’re in the slammer. Has the US gone insane over illegal immigration? Is the rage some feel about immigrants going to cause us to shoot ourselves in the foot?

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