Voter I.D. laws are constitutional and needed

You cannot claim that you are "tired" of identity conflict when the system upon which your entire argument is predicated--that is, the nation-state--functions entirely on a mechanism of exclusion that parses out categories like "citizen" and "illegal". That you invoke expulsion procedures--deportation or inclusve expulsion in the form of imprisonment--is proof enough of participation in this exclusive operation. In other cases, things like sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation can create conflict, certainly. Yet, if you claim to have no taste for this conflict, it would be self-defeating to then claim a preference for the inclusion of biological life--to which things like sex and ethnicity are merely potential predicates--in the political and juridical spheres. At the moment at which I reject political partitioning in the form of "countries", "citizens", "sovereignty", and others, appeal to what a "successful country" would do is futile.Regarding the study: the calculations are done as (total number of institutionalized) / (total number of individuals in a subject population), so it is inaccurate to take the "more natives get arrested because there are more natives). And, as is indicated on pp. 9-10, it's likely that immigrants are extremely undercounted by Census officials (up to a 37:1 immigrant:native ratio in the 1990 Census). So, not only is it true that immigrants are less frequently institutionalized--if the counting of immigrants was more accurate, the larger denominator would produce an even greater disparity between natives and immigrants.Moreover, it is also not useful to use arrest statistics when almost half of the arrests reported have to do with immigration. If we're trying to figure out whether immigrants are criminals, it's sort of inane to include illegal immigration, since it's by definition a criminal act. By that definition, all illegal immigrants are criminals--but that's not really what we're talking about. We're discussing things like theft, rape, murder, etc. Violent crimes, more or less. So:1. Getting rid of immigration and drug-trafficking (non-violent crime), you have 27% of total arrests being for crimes ranging from theft to violent crime. Oddly, 45 + 27 = 72%. Apparently, the other 28% are things like DUIs and obstruction, but those don't exactly seem earth-shattering.2. (.27 x 459,614) = appx. 124,100 crimes. So, that leaves you around 2.25 crimes/illegal. And that's if you're doing averages. If we actually measure individual variance, I suspect that you would begin to see the worst crimes concentrated in a minority (already within a minority, mind you).3. Your link doesn't even take us to a study--it takes us to a hazy secondhand website (which, given that it's called "Renew America", probably has some kind of agenda) which cites A) the names of three institutions, B) raw statistics, C) "some criminologists" and "researchers". That isn't very convincing.Seems like we would probably be better off not assuming by default that the people who self-select to immigrate over here are the hardest of criminals. This is why I protest so harshly the term "illegal". By parsing the "citizen" from the "illegal", the former is always already criminal, as Pro reaffirms in this last round: "And there is no doubt that they are criminals. It is a crime to illegally cross our borders, so the first act in this country is a crime." The "us" and "them", the "ours" and "theirs", the "citizen" and the "illegal"--it all sets up the sort of world I've described, in which the Other must always be assimilated or expelled. When the immigrant cannot assume the form either of the "citizen" or the "deportee", he immediately becomes a criminal--an "illegal"--who constitutes a threat against the Nation, and therefore, against the State (to which the identity of Nation is immediately tied). As such, their very existence becomes criminal. Pro, by characterizing them as "illegals", seems to hold some hope of attaching to them also every predicate commonly associated with the term "criminal": rapist, murderer, thief. And this is all wrapped up, I submit, in the very system Pro is attempting to defend with Voter ID laws (and which, at the beginning of Round 3, Pro seeks to dismiss by distancing himself from other forms of identity conflict). This, I argue, is precisely why we should withdraw our support.And of course, I've never claimed that immigrants necessarily are refugees--rather, the refugee is a useful paradigm for considering the case of the immigrant; they share, I suggested, some underlying conflict with the National-State apparatus. Abandoning attempts to expel these immigrants, however, Pro, rejecting altogether the possibility of transcending inclusion and exclusion (indicated by the paradigm of the refugee who cannot, for whatever reason, be repatriated, but who nevertheless expresses no desire to be naturalized), turns to the possibility of inclusion. He advocates the typical "they ought to do it legally" approach, which, as the discursive template laid out by this card suggests, doesn't really function as advertised [http://www.nfap.com...].One might be inclined to skepticism about the burdens of legal immigration. Surely, one might think, immigration procedures aren't that backlogged? Unfortunately, even immigration law experts [http://www.litwinlaw.com...] suggest that the average wait, if you're lucky, is a few years. Processing times, backlog, interview scheduling, visa and green card caps--all of these draw out just how difficult it is to participate in the inclusion operation [http://trac.syr.edu...]. Fourth preference individuals, for instance, have an average wait time of 12-15 years. If I applied to immigrate at 20, I would probably be almost 35 years old before my application was even given serious consideration. And this, mind you, is only to get a visa or a green card. Full citizenship is a bit further still down the road. And, in some countries with large backlogs, like Canada, immigrants who have been waiting 5, 10, some more than 20 years just to hear back on their applications, could see their cases simply chopped from the list [http://www.cbc.ca...]. At the very least, this ought to raise the question of how many applications could be cut in the US as we see wait times and caseloads continue to climb. Pro can criminalize illegal immigrants as much as he would like; yet, when the smoke clears, it becomes obvious that the very political order which he is trying to defend through Voter ID laws is the same system which, eventually breaking down from internal contradiction, comes to make "necessary" the arguments advanced by Pro.And, as much I don't want to engage it, I have to at last hit the "jobs" line. First: [http://www.youtube.com...] Second, foreign workers don't displace natives--they contribute to growth because of extra demand (which results in new employment). [http://www.factcheck.org...] And I mean, the majority of jobs that immigrants take are low-skill (sometimes migrant) jobs that involve things like back-breaking physical labor on farms, which most ordinary Americans probably wouldn't take if it was offered to them. In fact, when the UFW put the offer on the table [http://takeourjobs.org...], it had only attracted three takers by the time it was discussed on the Colbert Report [http://www.nowpublic.com...]. The fact that we don't "own" "our" jobs as it is is bad enough. That native-displacement theory is just factually inaccurate is one more nail in the coffin. A good sum-up of this line of attack can be found here [http://www.beacon.org...].With laws like these, what's to respect?