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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Migration podcast Unbroken.

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Neil And I'm Jackie Broadhead, and today we are talking about municipal I.D. cards for people generally,

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including migrants and including irregular migrants. And it's not really an area that I have much familiarity with, whereas Jackie knows all about it.

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So Jackie, can you just explain a little bit about why cities have started issuing issuing ID?

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Yeah, thanks, Rob. I think this is a really interesting topic of migration governance because we

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tend to think about governance as being about citizenship or being about visas,

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all of which are generally controlled at the national level.

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But if we want to think about residents in a place and access to services in a city that might be decided at the city level,

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and that's when a city is going to just might decide, oh,

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we need to know who has kind of residence rights that's very separate from immigration status.

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And what's really interesting with the case of ID NYC is that they said this is about why your resident,

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why you lay your hands, you know, not about your immigration status.

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And so ID NYC is the card that basically says that you're a New Yorker,

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but it's not about whether you were a U.S. citizen and it's not about your migration status and it grants you

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access to certain things and all these sorts of sorts of things that are beneficial for the whole population.

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But it also has that sense of being about your identity within the city, which is quite different from your citizenship or your national identity.

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So I mean, effectively what we're looking at here is something which says our role as a city,

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our role as our role is sort of as the bureaucracy within the city is not necessarily to enforce migration policy.

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It's that we're there to make the city function effectively.

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And if there are people here who are essentially in some kind of trouble as far as their migration status is concerned,

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well, that's for them to deal with, with the UK, with the Home Office in the US.

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I guess it would be I.C.E. or whoever it is. But this this is a fundamentally different thing now.

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I mean, do you think that because you've worked on this kind of stuff, I mean, has this created tensions between central and local government?

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Definitely has created tensions. I know within New York, for example, the idea NYC was set up before the Trump administration came into office,

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and then there were very real conversations about whether the city would need to get rid of the database.

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For example, we talk about firewalls, you know,

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those principles of whether local government is required to share information or whether it chooses to share information with immigration enforcement.

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And and so there's that more adversarial side of things.

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But one of the things that we talk about is the idea that it's not necessarily just the local and national government adversarial,

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it's that they have fundamentally different roles. So when we think about the UK, for example, which doesn't have a strong ID card culture anyway,

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but does have a hostile environment where central government,

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the Home Office basically said that other parts of government, including local government,

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should be subordinate to its policy aims, that everybody should care about migration, governance.

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And what's interesting with ID cards and with some of the work of cities is not that they're saying there shouldn't be migration enforcement,

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but it's simply saying that's not our role within the kind of mechanisms of government.

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Our role is about access to services. It's about how we support all of the people in our city.

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And maybe even if we're if we're if we're happy or when neutral about central government doing its job,

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we're actually trying to achieve something quite different.

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And that's why I think these ID cards are really interesting because they're talking about the city as an identity and the city as having a

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different role from what we think about when we think about our nationality or or the way that we interact with the state at national level.

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Do you find that that has helped create integration outcomes, positive integration outcomes?

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I think it's quite a fine line to tread between an ID card that feels actually quite

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stigmatising if it's just for one group that might actually not be so great for integration,

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because having it is a marker that you're that you don't belong versus an ID card that is trying to have a sense of universality.

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So it's trying to say we have a shared identity regardless of what we might say about about immigration status or about your citizenship or whatever.

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And I think that is very important to integration. That idea of a shared identity, that idea of, you know, building the idea of us,

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you know, the in-group, the group that we are all part of rather than us.

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And then that all feels really important. And we know that that's really important to integration.

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And so, I mean, we should talk about New York stuff, but between different and different locations.

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It's important. I mean, like a place like New York. This is obviously a, you know, highly cosmopolitan city.

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But, you know, when you're talking about, you know, some small I mean, even a small town like in the agricultural elements or something like that,

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is this also somewhere where something like this where an I.D. card actually facilitates residents or at least facilitates sort of access to services?

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Is it feasible or is it only possible to do this in hyper cosmopolitan places?

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Yeah, I think this example is also interesting because of what it tells us about policy diffusion.

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So particularly between cities and particularly through city networks, most notably on climate change, but increasingly on migration,

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we're seeing this trend for cities to want to look at best practices from their cities and to lift them and put them into their own contexts.

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So that can have lots of advantages because it's, you know,

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allowing for innovation and it's allowing for people to kind of see how things are done differently, to not be limited by what's happened in the past.

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But the risk is exactly as you say, You know, can these things just be lifted and dropped wholesale?

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And ID cards, I think, is a really good example of one where, no,

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the experience has not been that you can just lift the New York model and drop it into another context.

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Lots of European cities. So cities in in Switzerland, for example, in the Netherlands and France, there's lots of interest,

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but they've required quite a lot of work to think about how it would land and how it would work while in their national context.

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So in the U.K., there's been very little traction for it because we don't have the ID card culture.

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That would mean that this sort of thing would be taken up in some European countries that really do think about the Padron card.

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And in Spain, that's already been used quite a lot by cities like Barcelona.

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But yeah, other cities that are thinking about it. But the real lesson here is that you can't just lift an idea and import it wholesale.

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You have to adapt it to your circumstances, which is a neat place to take us.

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Obviously, the conversation with the people who've been working on this on the ground.

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I'm joined today by Dr. Albert Kamara,

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who is the assistant deputy commissioner of the Indie NYC Project at the New York Department of Social Services, and by Dr. Myriam Chetty,

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who's a senior researcher for the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity here at campus and who is the principal

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investigator on the See Minds or the City Initiative of Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe Project.

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So, Albert, if I can just start with you. What is the role of documents and identification in migration documents generally?

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First, I think it's vital for any individual to have documentation that is accepted during the migration.

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I do think that's a vital part of migration so that an identity remains.

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However, it must be a partnership.

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Some countries have policies where they remove identity docs as part of the migration process, as part of the asylum process.

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And so now individuals are left with no means of identity, no means of verifying their identity and effectively become.

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I guess the best word I can use is nameless people within a society.

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And if you're nameless, if you lack an identity, you're not going to be able to do a lot of things that we take for granted day to day.

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You're not going be able to go to your child's school. You're not going to be able to to get a job.

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You're not going to be able to access many government services.

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The one thing that should be universal across countries, no matter what, is an understanding and an acceptance of identity as a human right.

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That is not something that is up for debate, is not something that should be used and weaponised as a deterrent,

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that it is a vital component of what it is to be a human being.

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I mean, we tend to see or re-imagine the role of identity documents, passports,

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all this kind of stuff within the migration debate as being something which is about proving your legal

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right to be somewhere and being something which is granted to you as some evidence of your legal status.

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But you're working on these municipal I.D. cards, the I.D. NYC card, and that's a very different thing, isn't it?

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Could you just explain to me a little bit about what that is and what it does, what it provides to people?

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I.D. NYC is a municipal I.D. card issued by the City of New York.

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It is accepted at all government buildings within New York City.

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It has a number of benefits attached to it, both private sector and cultural partners,

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I believe, where upwards of 40 cultural partners, museums, other institutions.

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And it's about accessibility to all parts of New York.

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For all residents of New York City, whose identity we can verify.

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There is a larger debate at the federal level, but identity is not a part of that.

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I.D. NYC is about doing what's best for the folks that are residents of the city, the folks that are our constituents.

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And that is what has been the unifying message behind the program and its success over the life span of the program.

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You know, we're now upwards of 1.6 million at the NYC cards having been issued.

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And it's because of that success, that unifying message that is important.

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And what it is, is identity is a human right.

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Everything else or other discussions are completely outside of that box.

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That introduces us then to this question, which is really I mean, if somebody doesn't have a legal status at national level,

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what the benefit of a local or regional bureaucracy providing them with an I.D. might be?

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Well, the benefits is access to services is the ability to assimilate,

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like many of us do not leave our local municipality in our lifetime, you know, or very rarely do.

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So by just having that ability. You've changed generations because these individuals now feel like a part of the community.

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These people have access to the services like everyone else. Their families,

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two generations after them do because of this opportunity of working with them to verify their identity and giving them the opportunity to have that,

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you know, individualism in in the societal level.

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There's nothing that can be done at the municipal level for what's a federal or countrywide problem.

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But at the local level, you have to discretion to really find solutions that work for the people that live within that community.

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And I think that municipal municipalities work towards that solution.

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They they they bring these folks out of you know, I know the terminologies, the shadows,

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you know, a a tier that is not on the level of the other folks that live within a municipality.

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Like one of the things that I think is beautiful about I.D. NYC and municipality programs is we're all New Yorkers.

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Everyone that has an idea, no one sees any New Yorker. Anyone that lives within New York City is a New Yorker.

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And that's something that idea NYC just verifies and and it evens the playing field.

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It creates that equity that maybe at a federal state level isn't available.

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But at a city level, we've created equity, which is huge because that is what it is like.

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No one is better than anyone else, and that's something that's vital for that.

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Very, very interesting. So, Miriam, if I can leverage to do that.

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So these policies, as we've discussed, are essentially subnational.

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So do you think that they do create tensions with national administrations?

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And how would you suggest that things like that?

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And overcome? Well, we haven't quite touched upon the sort of the definition of municipal ID cards,

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because there are different types of municipal I.D. cards that are being granted.

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I mean, to the one in New York City is is one type that's granted to all the residents.

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But there are other types in European cities that are slightly different.

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But before I go to that, I really wanted to stress this point that the municipal I.D. card is essentially promoting the right to the city and grant,

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in a sense of belonging to the territory to which everyone is entitled.

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So it's as Albert mentioned, it's really the recognition of all people living in that territory that is at stake as citizens and also as actors.

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And I want to go back to the sort of definitional element of it, which is the kind of right to city principle and, you know,

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introduced a while back by Henry Hyde back in 1968 and and which has been revisited by the

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U.N. recently in kind of setting up the Sustainable Development Goals known also as SDGs,

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and which stipulated that to ensure that cities and human settlements are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

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And kind of going back to the question around the some of the tensions, I mean,

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depending on the type of of the I.D. card, some some of the tensions can be circumvented and others cannot.

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So, for instance, I would like to give the example of of Spanish municipalities, and this is introducing one type of kind of identification,

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specifically the kind of municipality of Barcelona, where they have a registry kind of of all residents.

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So the procedure is kind of facilitated by the town hall.

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And regardless of the administrative status of anyone in the area and this this registry certifies the name,

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surname and the address of of the the citizen.

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And so this is very much rooted in the national kind of process of counting like citizens in by each municipality.

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So the census this provides everyone is rooted in the municipal territory and

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and will make it easy to develop and design services for citizens living there.

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Thank you very much for that. Now, Albert, just coming back to you.

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So what's the experience of New York told you about issuing I.D.s to people without legal status?

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And particularly, I wanted to ask whether it's benefits to the city itself or is it more about impacts to the individuals?

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I think they are kind of work together in parallel, because if you provide benefits to the people, which clearly having an I.D. NYC card does,

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because you're giving a segment of the population access to identity and services, I think that makes the city better.

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I think that that's a part of making and benefiting this, you know, municipality.

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And and I think clearly I.D. NYC has done that for New York City.

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I think that it's opened doors to individuals not just because of the aspect of what an identity means and access to services, access to institutions.

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But also in the New York case,

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the added benefits attached to I.D. NYC that open up doors to cultural institutions and and the impact that that has on unlearning,

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the impact that has on access to things that you didn't realise you want you had access to that you could access, that you were a part of.

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A lot of the great things are within the city.

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You know, I would I would say yes has been beneficial across the board for many and the city as a whole.

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Miriam Can you tell me a little bit about the impacts of receiving municipalities on the individuals themselves?

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I mean, other experiences extend beyond the New York experience.

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Yeah, I mean, well, obviously it's difficult to answer this without being the direct beneficiary of a simple I.D. card.

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But I think I mean, from the evidence. Yes, there is there's there's there's enough evidence that demonstrate that municipal I.D. cards make it safer,

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particularly for irregular migrants to interact with front line city workers and and to move around in the city more freely.

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And and there's also evidence that it makes it easier for for these irregular migrants to participate in local commerce or access,

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for instance, municipal. Citizens, as I mentioned.

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But, you know, there are other examples.

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So, for instance, in the city of Palermo, where back a few years ago,

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the mayor of Palermo declared something very similar to what Albert just mentioned, that everyone living in Palermo is a parliament.

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Parliament and that's right. But then.

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But then maybe I haven't.

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But then the sort of the central levels of the security kind of dimension of the Ministry of Interior and followed by prohibiting

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the registration of applicants and to this kind of protection in the civil registry and and limiting their access to services.

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And in this particular instance, there was a direct kind of political tension between central government and and local government.

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But this is quite unusual because this was kind of more political than in other municipalities where the sort of conflict is not so direct.

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So just to explore that a little bit further, I mean, there are two things that essentially you are describing there.

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One is, is that it's safer. And I just what I mean, like when you say safer, like am I terrified?

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Does this mean that there are fewer problematic interactions, for example, with police or or if there are victims of crime, for example?

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But the other thing you're talking about is a policy essentially of inclusion rather than exclusion,

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recognising that these people are basically there. And so therefore you're including them in the community,

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irrespective of whether or not there's sort of other reasons why people might want to exclude them on the basis of their legal status.

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But that question of safety and that question of inclusion, they seem to be key, Is that right?

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Yes, absolutely. I mean, the question of of safety and there is a whole body of evidence that's kind of growing, particularly in Europe,

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about like safe reporting and by irregular migrants and the kind of the separation between the police and and immigration services.

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And so in many instances, so, for instance, the city of Utrecht or the city of Gund or Milan in Italy and and so on and so forth.

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So there's, you know, currently quite sort of a number of research and case studies that are being developed around this.

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But beyond that, I mean, what this municipal I.D. card in instances in many European cities does actually, you know,

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once you have it, you're not, you know, systematically kind of stopped and arrested because you have an identity.

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Why, before, you know? I think that it's also important to sort of highlight the and the sort of when we're looking at irregular migrants,

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you know, like many of them lose their identity as soon as they kind of enter a territory and and then,

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you know, and then gain a local identity in some instances, not systematically, but, you know,

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like so there's that sort of tension between losing and gaining and to avoid being kind of removed or deported by immigration.

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Albert Lea, can I just ask you then how the program, the I.D. NYC program, has been greeted warmly by the local population?

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And also just to kind of inquire a little bit about whether this is something that you think is very specific to

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New York or whether or not you think it's something that less cosmopolitan areas might also be able to have,

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that it was a massive success in New York. That was a different time, though.

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That was 2014, 2015, before immigration became such a volatile issue in the United States.

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The program still has, according to my perspective, wide scale support within New York.

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But the New York situation is different, is unique. We are a very different type of city built on immigration.

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We are, you know, a city that supports this.

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But I think at the end of the day, any process for municipality programs, no matter where the location.

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I think the right thing here is how you message it. I always tell folks I'm like, this isn't a ID card for anyone special.

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This is an ID card for New Yorkers. And I think that is the messaging.

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I think that, you know, working with the community to understand what this is, is local government.

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Doing what the state and the federal government does, which is just verifying your identity.

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And it goes the same for everyone else, having, you know, like implemented processes that are secure with integrity.

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So folks feel confident that you are doing what needs to be done as it relates to integrity,

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but also understanding and simplifying it, getting away from the political components of immigration.

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And we may sound counterintuitive, but it's because you're going to debate.

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There's people on both sides of that issue. Get away from that,

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make it the simple argument of all we're doing is we have a built in process on the local level of verifying individual's identity.

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And as long as people meet that threshold, they can get this I.D. card, which is a local ID card,

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which has these benefits attached to it, and it's to, you know, provide equity,

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because one of the things people don't realise is there are numbers of vulnerable groups that do not even have access to I.D. at the state level,

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because a $10 cost, a $20 cost is a barrier they cannot confront.

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We're talking about youth. We're talking about folks that are unhoused.

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We're talking about folks that are seniors that live on a fixed budget.

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And so I know I see being a free I.D. program meets that need for these individual, you know, and that opens doors for youth.

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What does this mean? This means they could get some youth employment.

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When you start telling those stories about how these local ID programs create equity,

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I think it creates what we want, which is a universal understanding, the right messaging.

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And at the end of the day, what is the message you want over any municipal I.D. program?

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It is for everyone within that municipality. This is an ID card for all New Yorkers.

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Follow that, hit it right, reinforce it, clarify it as much as possible,

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because that's the way to have this success and do what's best for the folks that live within that municipality.

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And so just to be clear, so I understand this. I mean, this is no this is no protection against against immigration enforcement or anything like that.

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It's purely a means of demonstrating that we know who you are, You live in the city and what you're living in the city.

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You can avail yourself of the services that are here. Agreed.

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The arguments on the federal and state level are something far removed from what we're doing here on a municipal level.

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So, Miriam, is this an approach which is actually gaining more support internationally?

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I mean, what are the experiences of other cities and regions around the world on positive and negative of similar schemes?

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And do you think that we're going to see more and more of this? Right.

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Well, it's certainly the case that more and more cities across the globe are developing some version of an ID card.

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So. And as I mentioned at the start, I think there's there's at least three different types.

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The first one is, is the more kind of administrative and that allows all the citizens in that territory to be registered and recognised.

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You know, the case for the City of Barcelona, the Pentagon and the city of Barcelona.

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And then we have the second type, which is local I.D. cards for specific audiences.

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And this is gaining more popularity in Europe.

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And these cards are aimed to offer services to people affected by situations of very vulnerable vulnerability and precariousness.

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And so I'll give here a couple of examples.

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So actually, the city of Detroit in the Netherlands has developed two types of I.D. cards.

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So one is called U Card, which is developed for Utrecht for everyone, like all citizens.

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And then the second one, which is called Bebe Program Cards, which stands for a program called Bed Bath and Bread for Irregular Migrants,

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and which is funded nationally for a number of Dutch cities.

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And so these holders of these baby cards are protected from arrest.

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Once they kind of show their cards in other parts of Europe.

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So, for instance, in France, there is the carte blanche,

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which is in the city of nod and which is aimed to promote access to culture, sports and leisure for most vulnerable populations.

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And then the third type of of ID cards is called local inclusive citizenship cards.

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And these are specific schemes in which the notion of residents and right to city as well as solidarity are

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kind of intertwined to provide protection for vulnerable groups and to improve access to rights and services.

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Discrimination and guarantee links of trust between users and and local services.

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You've been listening to the Migration Oxford podcast. I'm Robert Neill.

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And I'm Jacqui Broadhead.