Hello and welcome to another episode of the Migration podcast Unbroken.
Neil And I'm Jackie Broadhead, and today we are talking about municipal I.D. cards for people generally,
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.
So Jackie, can you just explain a little bit about why cities have started issuing issuing ID?
Yeah, thanks, Rob. I think this is a really interesting topic of migration governance because we
tend to think about governance as being about citizenship or being about visas,
all of which are generally controlled at the national level.
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,
and that's when a city is going to just might decide, oh,
we need to know who has kind of residence rights that's very separate from immigration status.
And what's really interesting with the case of ID NYC is that they said this is about why your resident,
why you lay your hands, you know, not about your immigration status.
And so ID NYC is the card that basically says that you're a New Yorker,
but it's not about whether you were a U.S. citizen and it's not about your migration status and it grants you
access to certain things and all these sorts of sorts of things that are beneficial for the whole population.
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.
So I mean, effectively what we're looking at here is something which says our role as a city,
our role as our role is sort of as the bureaucracy within the city is not necessarily to enforce migration policy.
It's that we're there to make the city function effectively.
And if there are people here who are essentially in some kind of trouble as far as their migration status is concerned,
well, that's for them to deal with, with the UK, with the Home Office in the US.
I guess it would be I.C.E. or whoever it is. But this this is a fundamentally different thing now.
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?
Definitely has created tensions. I know within New York, for example, the idea NYC was set up before the Trump administration came into office,
and then there were very real conversations about whether the city would need to get rid of the database.
For example, we talk about firewalls, you know,
those principles of whether local government is required to share information or whether it chooses to share information with immigration enforcement.
And and so there's that more adversarial side of things.
But one of the things that we talk about is the idea that it's not necessarily just the local and national government adversarial,
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,
but does have a hostile environment where central government,
the Home Office basically said that other parts of government, including local government,
should be subordinate to its policy aims, that everybody should care about migration, governance.
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,
but it's simply saying that's not our role within the kind of mechanisms of government.
Our role is about access to services. It's about how we support all of the people in our city.
And maybe even if we're if we're if we're happy or when neutral about central government doing its job,
we're actually trying to achieve something quite different.
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
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.
Do you find that that has helped create integration outcomes, positive integration outcomes?
I think it's quite a fine line to tread between an ID card that feels actually quite
stigmatising if it's just for one group that might actually not be so great for integration,
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.
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.
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,
you know, the in-group, the group that we are all part of rather than us.
And then that all feels really important. And we know that that's really important to integration.
And so, I mean, we should talk about New York stuff, but between different and different locations.
It's important. I mean, like a place like New York. This is obviously a, you know, highly cosmopolitan city.
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,
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?
Is it feasible or is it only possible to do this in hyper cosmopolitan places?
Yeah, I think this example is also interesting because of what it tells us about policy diffusion.
So particularly between cities and particularly through city networks, most notably on climate change, but increasingly on migration,
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.
So that can have lots of advantages because it's, you know,
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.
But the risk is exactly as you say, You know, can these things just be lifted and dropped wholesale?
And ID cards, I think, is a really good example of one where, no,
the experience has not been that you can just lift the New York model and drop it into another context.
Lots of European cities. So cities in in Switzerland, for example, in the Netherlands and France, there's lots of interest,
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.
So in the U.K., there's been very little traction for it because we don't have the ID card culture.
That would mean that this sort of thing would be taken up in some European countries that really do think about the Padron card.
And in Spain, that's already been used quite a lot by cities like Barcelona.
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.
You have to adapt it to your circumstances, which is a neat place to take us.
Obviously, the conversation with the people who've been working on this on the ground.
I'm joined today by Dr. Albert Kamara,
who is the assistant deputy commissioner of the Indie NYC Project at the New York Department of Social Services, and by Dr. Myriam Chetty,
who's a senior researcher for the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity here at campus and who is the principal
investigator on the See Minds or the City Initiative of Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe Project.
So, Albert, if I can just start with you. What is the role of documents and identification in migration documents generally?
First, I think it's vital for any individual to have documentation that is accepted during the migration.
I do think that's a vital part of migration so that an identity remains.
However, it must be a partnership.
Some countries have policies where they remove identity docs as part of the migration process, as part of the asylum process.
And so now individuals are left with no means of identity, no means of verifying their identity and effectively become.
I guess the best word I can use is nameless people within a society.
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.
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.
You're not going to be able to access many government services.
The one thing that should be universal across countries, no matter what, is an understanding and an acceptance of identity as a human right.
That is not something that is up for debate, is not something that should be used and weaponised as a deterrent,
that it is a vital component of what it is to be a human being.
I mean, we tend to see or re-imagine the role of identity documents, passports,
all this kind of stuff within the migration debate as being something which is about proving your legal
right to be somewhere and being something which is granted to you as some evidence of your legal status.
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?
Could you just explain to me a little bit about what that is and what it does, what it provides to people?
I.D. NYC is a municipal I.D. card issued by the City of New York.
It is accepted at all government buildings within New York City.
It has a number of benefits attached to it, both private sector and cultural partners,
I believe, where upwards of 40 cultural partners, museums, other institutions.
And it's about accessibility to all parts of New York.
For all residents of New York City, whose identity we can verify.
There is a larger debate at the federal level, but identity is not a part of that.
I.D. NYC is about doing what's best for the folks that are residents of the city, the folks that are our constituents.
And that is what has been the unifying message behind the program and its success over the life span of the program.
You know, we're now upwards of 1.6 million at the NYC cards having been issued.
And it's because of that success, that unifying message that is important.
And what it is, is identity is a human right.
Everything else or other discussions are completely outside of that box.
That introduces us then to this question, which is really I mean, if somebody doesn't have a legal status at national level,
what the benefit of a local or regional bureaucracy providing them with an I.D. might be?
Well, the benefits is access to services is the ability to assimilate,
like many of us do not leave our local municipality in our lifetime, you know, or very rarely do.
So by just having that ability. You've changed generations because these individuals now feel like a part of the community.
These people have access to the services like everyone else. Their families,
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,
you know, individualism in in the societal level.
There's nothing that can be done at the municipal level for what's a federal or countrywide problem.
But at the local level, you have to discretion to really find solutions that work for the people that live within that community.
And I think that municipal municipalities work towards that solution.
They they they bring these folks out of you know, I know the terminologies, the shadows,
you know, a a tier that is not on the level of the other folks that live within a municipality.
Like one of the things that I think is beautiful about I.D. NYC and municipality programs is we're all New Yorkers.
Everyone that has an idea, no one sees any New Yorker. Anyone that lives within New York City is a New Yorker.
And that's something that idea NYC just verifies and and it evens the playing field.
It creates that equity that maybe at a federal state level isn't available.
But at a city level, we've created equity, which is huge because that is what it is like.
No one is better than anyone else, and that's something that's vital for that.
Very, very interesting. So, Miriam, if I can leverage to do that.
So these policies, as we've discussed, are essentially subnational.
So do you think that they do create tensions with national administrations?
And how would you suggest that things like that?
And overcome? Well, we haven't quite touched upon the sort of the definition of municipal ID cards,
because there are different types of municipal I.D. cards that are being granted.
I mean, to the one in New York City is is one type that's granted to all the residents.
But there are other types in European cities that are slightly different.
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,
in a sense of belonging to the territory to which everyone is entitled.
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.
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,
introduced a while back by Henry Hyde back in 1968 and and which has been revisited by the
U.N. recently in kind of setting up the Sustainable Development Goals known also as SDGs,
and which stipulated that to ensure that cities and human settlements are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
And kind of going back to the question around the some of the tensions, I mean,
depending on the type of of the I.D. card, some some of the tensions can be circumvented and others cannot.
So, for instance, I would like to give the example of of Spanish municipalities, and this is introducing one type of kind of identification,
specifically the kind of municipality of Barcelona, where they have a registry kind of of all residents.
So the procedure is kind of facilitated by the town hall.
And regardless of the administrative status of anyone in the area and this this registry certifies the name,
surname and the address of of the the citizen.
And so this is very much rooted in the national kind of process of counting like citizens in by each municipality.
So the census this provides everyone is rooted in the municipal territory and
and will make it easy to develop and design services for citizens living there.
Thank you very much for that. Now, Albert, just coming back to you.
So what's the experience of New York told you about issuing I.D.s to people without legal status?
And particularly, I wanted to ask whether it's benefits to the city itself or is it more about impacts to the individuals?
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,
because you're giving a segment of the population access to identity and services, I think that makes the city better.
I think that that's a part of making and benefiting this, you know, municipality.
And and I think clearly I.D. NYC has done that for New York City.
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.
But also in the New York case,
the added benefits attached to I.D. NYC that open up doors to cultural institutions and and the impact that that has on unlearning,
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.
A lot of the great things are within the city.
You know, I would I would say yes has been beneficial across the board for many and the city as a whole.
Miriam Can you tell me a little bit about the impacts of receiving municipalities on the individuals themselves?
I mean, other experiences extend beyond the New York experience.
Yeah, I mean, well, obviously it's difficult to answer this without being the direct beneficiary of a simple I.D. card.
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,
particularly for irregular migrants to interact with front line city workers and and to move around in the city more freely.
And and there's also evidence that it makes it easier for for these irregular migrants to participate in local commerce or access,
for instance, municipal. Citizens, as I mentioned.
But, you know, there are other examples.
So, for instance, in the city of Palermo, where back a few years ago,
the mayor of Palermo declared something very similar to what Albert just mentioned, that everyone living in Palermo is a parliament.
Parliament and that's right. But then.
But then maybe I haven't.
But then the sort of the central levels of the security kind of dimension of the Ministry of Interior and followed by prohibiting
the registration of applicants and to this kind of protection in the civil registry and and limiting their access to services.
And in this particular instance, there was a direct kind of political tension between central government and and local government.
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.
So just to explore that a little bit further, I mean, there are two things that essentially you are describing there.
One is, is that it's safer. And I just what I mean, like when you say safer, like am I terrified?
Does this mean that there are fewer problematic interactions, for example, with police or or if there are victims of crime, for example?
But the other thing you're talking about is a policy essentially of inclusion rather than exclusion,
recognising that these people are basically there. And so therefore you're including them in the community,
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.
But that question of safety and that question of inclusion, they seem to be key, Is that right?
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,
about like safe reporting and by irregular migrants and the kind of the separation between the police and and immigration services.
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.
So there's, you know, currently quite sort of a number of research and case studies that are being developed around this.
But beyond that, I mean, what this municipal I.D. card in instances in many European cities does actually, you know,
once you have it, you're not, you know, systematically kind of stopped and arrested because you have an identity.
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,
you know, like many of them lose their identity as soon as they kind of enter a territory and and then,
you know, and then gain a local identity in some instances, not systematically, but, you know,
like so there's that sort of tension between losing and gaining and to avoid being kind of removed or deported by immigration.
Albert Lea, can I just ask you then how the program, the I.D. NYC program, has been greeted warmly by the local population?
And also just to kind of inquire a little bit about whether this is something that you think is very specific to
New York or whether or not you think it's something that less cosmopolitan areas might also be able to have,
that it was a massive success in New York. That was a different time, though.
That was 2014, 2015, before immigration became such a volatile issue in the United States.
The program still has, according to my perspective, wide scale support within New York.
But the New York situation is different, is unique. We are a very different type of city built on immigration.
We are, you know, a city that supports this.
But I think at the end of the day, any process for municipality programs, no matter where the location.
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.
This is an ID card for New Yorkers. And I think that is the messaging.
I think that, you know, working with the community to understand what this is, is local government.
Doing what the state and the federal government does, which is just verifying your identity.
And it goes the same for everyone else, having, you know, like implemented processes that are secure with integrity.
So folks feel confident that you are doing what needs to be done as it relates to integrity,
but also understanding and simplifying it, getting away from the political components of immigration.
And we may sound counterintuitive, but it's because you're going to debate.
There's people on both sides of that issue. Get away from that,
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.
And as long as people meet that threshold, they can get this I.D. card, which is a local ID card,
which has these benefits attached to it, and it's to, you know, provide equity,
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,
because a $10 cost, a $20 cost is a barrier they cannot confront.
We're talking about youth. We're talking about folks that are unhoused.
We're talking about folks that are seniors that live on a fixed budget.
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.
What does this mean? This means they could get some youth employment.
When you start telling those stories about how these local ID programs create equity,
I think it creates what we want, which is a universal understanding, the right messaging.
And at the end of the day, what is the message you want over any municipal I.D. program?
It is for everyone within that municipality. This is an ID card for all New Yorkers.
Follow that, hit it right, reinforce it, clarify it as much as possible,
because that's the way to have this success and do what's best for the folks that live within that municipality.
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.
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.
You can avail yourself of the services that are here. Agreed.
The arguments on the federal and state level are something far removed from what we're doing here on a municipal level.
So, Miriam, is this an approach which is actually gaining more support internationally?
I mean, what are the experiences of other cities and regions around the world on positive and negative of similar schemes?
And do you think that we're going to see more and more of this? Right.
Well, it's certainly the case that more and more cities across the globe are developing some version of an ID card.
So. And as I mentioned at the start, I think there's there's at least three different types.
The first one is, is the more kind of administrative and that allows all the citizens in that territory to be registered and recognised.
You know, the case for the City of Barcelona, the Pentagon and the city of Barcelona.
And then we have the second type, which is local I.D. cards for specific audiences.
And this is gaining more popularity in Europe.
And these cards are aimed to offer services to people affected by situations of very vulnerable vulnerability and precariousness.
And so I'll give here a couple of examples.
So actually, the city of Detroit in the Netherlands has developed two types of I.D. cards.
So one is called U Card, which is developed for Utrecht for everyone, like all citizens.
And then the second one, which is called Bebe Program Cards, which stands for a program called Bed Bath and Bread for Irregular Migrants,
and which is funded nationally for a number of Dutch cities.
And so these holders of these baby cards are protected from arrest.
Once they kind of show their cards in other parts of Europe.
So, for instance, in France, there is the carte blanche,
which is in the city of nod and which is aimed to promote access to culture, sports and leisure for most vulnerable populations.
And then the third type of of ID cards is called local inclusive citizenship cards.
And these are specific schemes in which the notion of residents and right to city as well as solidarity are
kind of intertwined to provide protection for vulnerable groups and to improve access to rights and services.
Discrimination and guarantee links of trust between users and and local services.
You've been listening to the Migration Oxford podcast. I'm Robert Neill.
And I'm Jacqui Broadhead.