Today in the news was an interesting tidbit. Puerto Rico has this hair-brained scheme to void millions of birth certificates in an attempt to curb identity theft and human trafficking. Somehow they want their five million people to re-establish citizenship and be assigned new tamper-resistant certificates. Birth Certificates created prior to 2010 will be destroyed.
Let's think about that for a sec. A fair amount of Puerto Ricans live in the US. How is it going to work for them as they look for a job, renew a driver's license, rent an apartment, open a bank account, register children for school?
Did you ever hear of such a thing? I've lived in several states other than Cali, but it was great to come home and be reassigned the original license number from when I was a teen. Very cool! No new number to learn, and in fact it remained very cool until no renewal notice came in the mail. So I toodled on down to the DMV on my lunch hour to see what was going on.
To my surprise, this drew a lot of attention. There were suspicious glances and strange questions like Where Did You GET This License? Do You Have Your Birth Certificate? May We See Some Additional Identification, Please? The only thing missing was the little bare table with the light in my eyes.
What came out after the whole mess was talked around the pole is that the number printed on my license was in the system but not assigned to me. There was a photo and everything, a photo of some big guy I never met who lives in Los Angeles. Don't look at me! I don't know how it happened.
It was a holy mess for a while because, in addition to the DMV giving away my beloved number, they also deleted my driving history. According to the US, I had never applied for or driven in any state in which I'd lived. But but but ... what about my good driver discount?
I tried everything. I called insurance companies in the hopes they had physical copies of the license in their files. I checked with banks. I dug through old files and produced the first driver's license I ever received in 1971. And it still took 2 months for them to issue another license and 3 years of driving for my insurance carrier to re-establish the good driver discount. But first, I had to produce two additional forms of ID.
And so when I say I cannot imagine the complexities of doing a reboot of every birth certificate for 5 million people, I mean it. Puerto Rico is out of its mind.
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