New Green Card to Suggest Greener Pastures for Immigrants?

The government hasn't shown much love for immigrants of late, what with Arizona passing the "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" bill, and 10 other states hot on the trail.

So when U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services unveiled a redesigned green card yesterday, we braced ourselves. Surely it would involve some horrid, jingoistic mashup of eagles and flags and rah-rah-U.S.A. crap. Right? Luckily, improbably, we were wrong.

Make no mistake. Tech-wise, the green card is plenty nativistic. It was designed to "deter immigration fraud" and incorporates "several major new security features" to that end. Among them: laser-engraved fingerprints; high-res micro-images on the back of the card that are nearly impossible to reproduce; and embedded radio frequency identification that lets border protection officers scan cards from afar like a sort of digital Panopticon.

But from a pure aesthetic standpoint, the card has hope written all over it. The most prominent image is of the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty, of course, is one of the first things you see when you sail into the New York harbor and has stood as a sunny welcome sign to shipboard immigrants for more than 100 years. It's the symbol of the American Dream. Emblazoning it on the green card reads like a greeting to America with great, big, open arms.

On the back of the card, the high-res micro-images depict state flags and U.S. presidents, but they're so small, they might as well be kittens. Not exactly a plea for patriotism. Contrast that to the U.S. passport, which was redesigned in 2007 after six years of planning, and resembled, well, a jingoistic mashup of eagles and flags and rah-rah-U.S.A. camp.

Most importantly, the card is actually green. Over the years, it has been pink, beige, blue -- pretty much anything but green. (Green was among the earliest colors, though not the first one.) Restoring the card to the color for which it was named suggests some move toward coherence. Now if only immigration policy could do the same.