Written by Janet

On Randolph road in Rockville, Maryland, there’s a shopping center with a modest Parcel Plus store where small businesses can rent mailboxes by the month. But it’s also the address used by 42 undocumented immigrants living in states along the Eastern Seaboard to fake a Maryland residence so they could get a driver’s license, records show.

Most of them have gotten away with it - evidence that Maryland — the last holdout east of the Colorado Rockies in the nationwide effort to tighten rules on how states issue driver’s licenses — has become a magnet for illegal immigrants from Georgia to Delaware seeking driving privileges.

Maryland, along with Washington, Hawaii, and New Mexico, does not check the immigration status of drivers when they apply for a license. This has made the state vulnerable to widespread fraud by illegal immigrants living outside Maryland — as well as to criminals seeking to create false identities — according to court records and interviews with state officials.

And in some states, state workers who issue licenses have run sophisticated schemes right out of Motor Vehicle Administration branches. Many of those employees have been successfully prosecuted. Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), stated Security is the chief concern as the General Assembly debates whether to require license-seekers to verify their lawful presence in the country. It’s a change the Democratic-controlled legislature has resisted out of sensitivity to immigrants. But to comply with a federal law known as Real ID, the state must show this year that legal residents have access to a secure, nationally recognized license.

Immigrant rights advocates support a two-tiered system that would also comply with federal law by allowing newcomers without proof of legal status to get a limited license for driving — but not to board airplanes, enter federal buildings or cross borders. O’Malley and other opponents say that wouldn’t stop the fraud problem.

Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Administrator, John Kuo says there are at most 300,000 illegal immigrants living in the state, since 2006 his agency has processed about 350,000 licenses for drivers using foreign documents without U.S. visa stamps.

Maryland’s license is considered so insecure that some states, including Colorado, Arizona and Oklahoma, no longer accept it as a proof of identity for relocating drivers.

MVA officials said it is relatively easy for illegal immigrants from other states to get a Maryland license. They must take a driving test, but they can prove their identity with a foreign driver’s license or passport even if it lacks a U.S. visa stamp, along with statements from cellphone companies or banks. Such bills are also used as proof of a Maryland address — and if you call a bank or cellphone company, they will change the address with no questions asked.

Officials successfully prosecuted 250 cases of residency fraud last year. The MVA cancelled an additional 246 licenses it says were fraudulently obtained in 2007, including those delivered to the Parcel Plus on Randolph Road.

MVA officials said the scale of attempted fraud is underscored by the volume of out-of-state calls to the toll-free number dedicated to scheduling appointments for applicants using foreign documents without U.S. visa stamps. During the last three months of 2008, almost one in four of the 297,1000 calls originated from 53 states and territories outside Maryland. Among them were 21,998 from Virginia.

In addition, the U.S. attorney’s office has prosecuted members of numerous bribery rings that worked out of the MVA, including Valentin Millstein, the owner of a Silver Spring driving school convicted of scheming with an employee and former employee at the Beltsville branch. They issued more than 100 fraudulent licenses and identification cards to drivers, some illegal immigrants, who paid $2,000 each.

But Kimberly Propeack of the immigrant advocacy group CASA of Maryland, noted that bribery still goes on in states where illegal immigrants can’t get licenses. And she said that whatever residency fraud Maryland might prevent by tightening its rules would be outweighed by a rise in internal corruption and document mills.

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