The administration has had to back off the rule that travelers within this hemisphere have passports, because the State Department's bureaucracy couldn't handle the backlog of applications. (People waiting until the last minute.) See this Government Executive piece.
That's the sort of thing one could expect if the immigration bill, that seems dead in the water, were to pass. What we could and should be doing is encouraging people to issue, and illegal immigrants to get, any form of ID possible (municipalities, consular ID's, etc.) with the idea that they'd be first in line for any future reform and they wouldn't suffer by doing so. That sort of halfway step is what I mean by loose linkage--easing people into the system, mostly for the benefit of the bureaucrats, but it will also benefit their clients.
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