Denying drivers licenses to illegal aliens is a current rightwing rallying cry. And like other rightwing rallying cries, this one supports an agenda. Here, the agenda is to increase state control over individual lives.
Requiring individuals to produce documents to obtain licenses, and requiring states to verify those documents before issuing licenses, is part and parcel of a larger current effort by rightwing extremists to accustom citizens to increasing intrusive government inspection of their lives and habits. This movement has already produced: national uniformity requirements for drivers licenses which will convert drivers licenses into de facto national ID cards; requirements for chip emplacement in passports, potentially enabling detailed tracking of personal movement; and a proposal to require Americans to seek permission from the government 72 hours before certain travel, including air travel.
Serious activists would be wise to oppose this agenda in every possible fashion, at every possible turn.
A number of ordinary American citizens cannot completely document their citizenship for reasons entirely beyond anyone's control. Local records are misplaced, lost (say) in fires or floods, or in some cases never existed. But beyond the important and legitimate concern that such people be treated fairly, there is another and more sinister possibility that we must not ignore: it is the malicious pretence that records do not exist.
The current Administration has already proposed, for example, that employers should be forced to fire individuals whose Social Security records contain inconsistencies. Like the drivers license proposal, that proposal was cloaked as an immigration control measure. But it had a hidden face: it offered the government an easy way to harass opponents, simply by notifying their employers that they must fire the individual in question because of Social Security records discrepancies.
Requiring ever-increasing documentation for drivers licenses may have a similar abuse potential. The political history of the United States in recent years at least suggests that a certain level of paranoia is sane and healthy: how else can one react to kidnapping for torture, assaults on habeas corpus and posse comitatus, sneak and peek and national security letters issued with gag orders but without meaningful oversight, warrantless wiretapping, the use of international watch lists to target anti-war activists, and any number of other totalitarian gestures?
The American system of checks and balances never depended merely upon the division of government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches but also involves certain local and federal distinctions. Immigration is a federal issue: the enforcement of national immigration laws are a federal responsibility, and there are appropriate federal agencies, such as the INS, charged with such enforcement. If the federal government fails to meet its obligations in this regard, voters and citizens should (of course) make their minds known and make their voices heard on the issue.
To regard immigration enforcement as a responsibility of state and local government is a mistake. These smaller entities lack the resources, coordination, and statutory basis for effective action on immigration issues. The attempt, to foist immigration enforcement responsibilities onto local government, can only encourage loud, pointless, and ineffective anger against local government: it is an attempt to divert attention from the responsible federal entity. By encouraging citizens to focus their attention on remedies that cannot work, the move to hold local government responsible for federal failure represents yet another instance of the rightwing effort to disempower citizens by confusing them.
The local-federal distinction allows distinct governments to pursue conflicting objectives, without attempting to solve the almost unsolvable problem of producing a unified policy that appropriately balances all considerations.
Drivers, for example, gain some advantage from the fact that other drivers have passed licensing tests and have obtained insurance. But in much of this country, it is simply impossible to survive without a vehicle, whether it is legally driven or illegally driven. So making licenses more difficult to obtain can only increase the number of unlicensed and uninsured drivers on the road. Common sense suggests that the person who is driving without license or insurance is more likely to flee the scene of an accident and less likely to stop and render aid. It for this reason that the law typically does not confiscate the licenses of drivers who have (say) cheated on their income taxes: though it might encourage some people to attend their tax obligations more carefully, it might also substantially reduce general respect for the law and make the roads less safe.
Entirely similar considerations apply to undocumented persons. Whether they cannot document their citizenship because records were unavoidably lost or because they entered the country illegally is largely irrelevant. Considerations of road safety suggest that the proper policy is to encourage them to obey the laws governing vehicular travel, rather than to encourage them to disregard such laws.
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