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Notes -
ICE arrests superintendent of Iowa's largest public school district
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested Ian Andre Roberts, who is the superintendent of the Des Moines (IA) public school district. If you've been following along with this aspect of the culture war, you probably figure he was arrested for abetting or protecting a student or faculty or staff member from them. But no; the guy is, according to ICE here illegally and was given a final order of removal in May 2024. ICE is strongly implying he never had any work authorization beyond a long-since-expired student visa. It seems to me pretty bold for someone here without work authorization to be in such a high-profile position. Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired. Someone screwed up there.
Other aspects are that he had a weapons possession charge in Pennsylvania from 2021, but this was a pissant ("5th degree summary offense") thing about having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded. More serious is that he fled the ICE agents when stopped; his car was found with a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash. I don't much care about the illegal-alien-in-possession aspect; making a whole range of normal activities super-illegal based on a status offense is a tyrant's trick. But fleeing certainly seems to indicate a guilty mind rather than some sort of error or misunderstanding on ICEs part.
At first I thought they might have the wrong guy; there's an Ian Andre Roberts from Guyana who competed in the Olympics. But no, that's actually the same guy.
On reddit, /r/desmoines is up in arms... about the arrest, of course, not about the school district hiring a guy with no work authorization.
This is confusing on so many levels.
The district claims that he completed his I-9 verification. I can understand why they'd be in none the wiser. But to fake a citizenship ? He must have created a fake passport or a social security card. That's hard mode.
Why was he illegal in the first place ? A nation's olympic representative would qualify for an O1 with an instant EB-1 green card. Public school districts are also eligible for cap-exempt H1bs. He could've become a citizen legally by now, if he wanted to. I won't be surprised if this is a case of 'dude keeps choosing the contrived illegal option over the straightforward legal option because people can be selectively stupid like that'.
That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.
As someone who is opposed to it, what I'm most worried about is the possibility of the government being able to 'unperson' someone. I live in Canada, where the government literally banned people who had not taken the COVID vaccine from entering a lot of establishments, enforced by presenting positive proof that you had been vaccinated. This severely curtailed my ability to participate in society until the restrictions ended.
Here are some of the wonderful things that a government could do with a national ID, ranked approximately in order of how long it would take the slippery slope to get to that point.
One thing I think is a very big disconnect between the left and the right is that a lot of the right (the libertarian/small government part) sees governments as (at best) a necessary evil, while the left doesn't necessarily think of it the same way. As someone who has libertarian leanings, what I see is that the government is constantly expanding its own power, while making decisions that are not to the benefit of the majority of its constituents. Elections tend to be shams, as we don't get to vote on the policies we actually want - we instead vote only on the policies we are allowed to vote on (for example, a large portion of Brexit was people voting against immigration; but the government decided it wanted more immigration anyways, so did that all on their own; in the last Canadian election, none of the parties that have ever formed government before ran on decreasing immigration - and we have roughly the same absolute amount of immigration as the US does, with 1/10 of the population). Here are the results of the last Canadian election; notice all the blue in Western Canada? It doesn't make a difference at all, as Quebec and Ontario voted to continue allowing Central Canada to loot the piggy bank in the west (and from my awareness, this occurs in the US too; cities have a lot of seats, and overwhelm the nearby countryside, even though the policies that are desired by the city are not in the best interests of the countryside). They also constantly violate their own rules; in Canada, it was determined that the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was 'not justified' in breaking up the convoy protest against him and his COVID policies. He suffered no consequences for this action. The order in the Canadian military to take the COVID vaccine was determined to be unlawful; however, by the time the ruling came through, it was too late to seek recompense for it (as a member of my family personally experienced).
To take a slightly more 'hinged' take on it; right now, in the US, I think it's fairly safe to say that a large percentage of leftists consider the current government to not only be illegitimate, but evil on top of that. I can assure you that when Biden was in charge, a large percentage of rightists considered it to be the same situation. Both parties spend approximately 50% of the time feeling like they're under siege from a government completely unaligned with their values; why would they ever accept anything that would make it easier for the government to do evil things to them?
I'm sure you don't need reminding that the Canadian government weaponized the financial system against domestic dissent during the Freedom Convoy, but it's worth pointing out that's the sort of action that "first-world Western democracies" now consider appropriate (even if the courts eventually disagreed, and even that is still under appeal).
Such governments should not be trusted with the ability to issue national ID cards, and since it's clear that even "liberal democracies" can evolve into this sort of government, they shouldn't be trusted with them either.
@anon_ is correct that the government is a necessary evil, but even before COVID I felt that it should be kept as small as possible. Now I think the argument is even clearer.
This may be true, but the price of accepting that (for us in the US) is that our government will never get a handle around removable aliens.
A government that cannot maintain territorial integrity is a government I consider to be "too small".
Well there ya go -- now we're at the point of tradeoffs with respect to the functions that are absolutely necessary.
It would be kinda silly if we both had government as a necessary evil and it was too disempowered to actually accomplish those ends.
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I believe the standard rebuttal is "cannot ≠will not".
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