Imagine, next week, you sit down to register for classes. You realize that you accidentally misread your designated registration time and that you missed it by a few hours. You try to sign up and are locked out of the system for the semester.

A similar situation is taking place in New York City: Those who applied for municipal identification cards during the last few weeks of 2015 are not able to access the cultural institutions to which the card provides free admission due to a technicality. They had no idea that applying at this time would strip them of their full access. Those who applied in the weeks before and after this blackout period were able to fully experience the benefits, which were extended into 2016.

The municipal ID program exists to provide free photo identification cards to anyone aged 14 and older, regardless of immigration status, housing situation or gender identity. The cards allow for better access to healthcare, especially among immigrant populations who may resort to using fake IDs and are often at risk being detained and deported when they seek out quality care. In New York City, 732,630 people or 10 percent of those eligible, applied for cards in the first year.

While this issue impacts a small portion of those who applied for IDs in 2015, it provokes a dialogue in the grand scheme of cardholders and city residents regarding the importance of equal access to intellectual experiences. Cultural institutions, including museums, the ballet, botanical gardens and zoos, have the power to teach, inspire, entertain and to raise standards of living, yet are often associated with only catering to the elite.

Most New York City establishments charge an admission fee. So while all are welcome to become patrons of the arts, it is exclusionary in that you must be able to foot the bill. This perception of elitism is perpetuated when the city is diminishing access to culture for the cardholders who are being denied these affordable opportunities. It is only right that New York rectify the situation by providing these people with the benefits they were not informed they would not receive and to insure that this does not happen again in all facets of city life.

The city should realize that the deeper purpose of the municipal program is twofold: Practically, it serves to give every resident some form of legitimate photo ID. Symbolically, they purport to create a tangible sense of identity by acknowledging the otherwise invisible, which is potentially of even more importance.

“These ID cards also foster a sense of community and connectedness within the city — this is an important benefit for the immigrants, and for the municipality as a whole,” said Kristi Andersen, a political science professor in Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

The municipal identification card program is an expanding one, having spread to nine municipalities across the country in the past nine years.

Other locations have been able to assess the impact these cards can have on the community: The first municipal IDs arose in 2007 to protect the large population of undocumented immigrants in New Haven, Connecticut, and have now grown to include debit card capacity, parking meter payments and use as a library card.

But the movement toward wider acceptance has not come without its obstacles. After the cards began to circulate, however, there were various raids on communities of illegal immigrants and the office of the Department of Immigration Services in New Haven. This scared a lot of cities from joining the movement.

However, this obstacle facing New York City, who recently joined the crowd, has proved to be a deprivation of resources by singling out the poor, as immigrants were singled out in New Haven. While New York is seemingly ahead of the curve, it creates a negative connotation for these cards, which hinders cities like Philadelphia and Detroit from realizing dreams of photo IDs in the first place.

While immigrants have primarily lead this fight for recognition, another important group is serviced by these cards: members of the gender non-binary community. Because gender is not a necessary element of the card, the municipal IDs allow for inclusion of all identities, transgender and beyond.

“Not recording sex on these cards is really important,” said Gretchen Purser, an assistant professor of sociology in the Maxwell School.  “Having access to a legitimate ID that does not box (people) into a specific gender is really liberating.”

While it is too early to tell what kind of effect these cards have on the wellbeing of the marginalized populations they serve in New York, the cards aim to promote unity in the community. By creating an environment where everyone can visit the same establishments and can come together without fear of deportation, detainment for homelessness or discrimination for identity, the sense of belonging and togetherness should skyrocket.

Immigrant and homeless children will have places to imagine and learn and see. A child can go to the ballet and then aspire to become a ballerina. In opening doors to those who are left in the shadows, metropolitan areas can thrive, children can dream and worlds can become a whole lot brighter. This means that municipalities must work to provide these services to the people and do so justly.

While the issue with cultural institutions faults the municipal ID program itself, there should be equal responsibility on the part of these establishments to redress the problem. Many major banks in New York are not accepting municipal IDs as legitimate documentation to open up bank accounts. The problem goes deeper in the sense that banks perceive the participants in the municipal ID program to be of lower income and status, and don’t think they can be a source of profit. This problem could be fixed with government intervention but, it seems, voluntary damage control is preferable.

“The government can mandate that banks accept these cards, but it’s better if they do it voluntarily,” said Purser. “It would demonstrate wider acceptance.”

This is just one way that the stigma and discrimination presides, and that forward movement is held back by bureaucracy.

So for now, we are still paving a new path of tangible ways of acknowledging and welcoming those cast out in society back into the greater community. The very device that provides identity is having an identity crisis and that is not acceptable. This campaign for equality needs to grow faster and wider to create the backbone from which more progress can stem.

Joanna Orland is a freshman newspaper and online journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at jorland@syr.edu.

Published on March 28, 2016 at 12:42 am