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In November, the Los Angeles City Council approved a plan to issue city-based identification cards, an initiative that will have wide-ranging benefits for the city’s hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. The ID cards would enable L.A. residents to open bank accounts and pay utility bills, easing the burdens of a lifestyle that, up to now, had been limited by a reliance on cash-only transactions.
L.A. joins a handful of other American cities, from San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. to New Haven, Conn., in creating the city-based ID system. Through their ID programs, these cities have made major strides in improving civil rights for immigrants whose lack of documentation has held back their economic activity and wealth generation. For Los Angeles, the ID cards will help legitimize a large segment of the city’s economy that had for decades been off the official books. By easing the banking complications of the undocumented, L.A. and other cities with ID card systems are also helping their own economies to flourish.
Nate Berg is a writer and journalist covering cities, architecture and urban planning. Nate’s work has been published in a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, NPR, Wired, Metropolis, Fast Company, Dwell, Architect, the Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many others. He is a former staff writer at The Atlantic Cities and was previously an assistant editor at Planetizen.