ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Marianne McCune of member station WNYC reports.
MARIANNE MCCUNE: Edwin Pastrana is a retired cop with a big screen TV, a tank full of tropical fish...
EDWIN PASTRANA: There's about 20 or 30 fish in there.
MCCUNE: ...and a cat he's trying to keep off the couch. Though he was born here, he's been handing out new birth certificate applications to all the Puerto Rican-born members of his family. He says the Puerto Rican government is right to get rid of the current ones.
PASTRANA: Somewhere along the way, someone's doing funny things with birth certificates. I always say I hate people, there's a reason for it.
MCCUNE: Best to take care of the problem before it balloons, Pastrana says. But he says most everyone else he talks to is irritated, suspicious or confused.
ALICIA TORRES: Everybody has to send these? It is mandatory or what? Yes?
JUANA TORRES: It's mandatory, Mommy, yes.
TORRES: Yeah?
MCCUNE: In the apartment downstairs, Pastrana's mother-in-law and sister-in-law review what they're supposed to do, while also watching a tela novella. Eighty- six-year-old Alicia Torres worries she needs to unearth her old birth certificate.
TORRES: You need birth certificate.
MCCUNE: Until she reads on the application that, no, you just send in a copy of a valid photo ID.
TORRES: That's it. It's okay?
MCCUNE: They'll both do it, they say. But this does not strike Juana Torres as something that will prevent fraud.
TORRES: Money buys anything.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TORRES: Anyone will do anything for money. You know?
MCCUNE: Okay, so this initiative won't keep all birth certificates off the black market, says Puerto Rico's secretary of state on his cell phone.
KENNETH MCCLINTOCK: What we're looking for with this law is to resolve maybe at least 90 percent of the problem, not necessarily deal with 100 percent of the problem.
MCCUNE: So schools, for example, or even soccer coaches and ballet teachers, keep files of students' birth certificates, he says. And with so many of them out there, some find their way into the wrong hands.
MCCLINTOCK: You know, your ballet teacher died last week and her daughter found a box with a bunch of files and put it out near the garbage, so it will be taken away by the garbage collector. And in doing so, you're exposing to misuse a box full of 175 birth certificates.
MCCUNE: Cesar Perales, of the civil rights group LatinoJustice, says his concern with the whole initiative is suddenly all Puerto Rican birth certificates appear suspicious. And he says stateside Puerto Ricans already have trouble convincing people that their documents are as good as any other American's.
CESAR PERALES: Just a couple of years ago, the state of New Hampshire decided that people with Puerto Rican passports would be treated like foreigners, and had to go to a special office in order to be able to get a driver's license.
MCCUNE: With this year's news, he says people applying for driver's licenses in other states have already reported having their birth certificates rejected.
PERALES: A declaration by the very government of Puerto Rico that birth certificates issued by that government really ought to be suspect - that makes it that much more difficult for people in this country who spent a lot of time proving that they are native-born citizens.
MCCUNE: Some people are simply attached to their old birth certificates. Sipping a cup of sweet coffee in a local cafe, 82-year-old Antonia Andujar says no way she will apply for the new certificate.
ANTONIA ANDUJAR: I keep my old one. It's nice.
MCCUNE: For NPR News, I'm Marianne McCune in New York.
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