Lawmakers Should Vote on License Reform

Albuquerque Journal
February 27, 2011
ALBUQUERQUE, NM

New Mexico's legislative Democrats are busy dialing up controversy over Republican Gov. Susana Martinez' use of robocalls to New Mexico's voters in her effort to get an up-or-down vote on issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Lawmakers should try dialing up Illinois, Georgia, Florida or New York instead.

In recent months people have been charged with bringing over illegal immigrants who are living in those states, which do not provide driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, to New Mexico.

Or they could take an extra step and punch in a foreign area code to call Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Poland or Russia. In recent months people have been charged with bringing citizens of those countries to the Land of Enchantment.

And it's not for green chile and a stroll down the Palace of the Governors portal.

Smugglers have made traveling to New Mexico a cottage industry in their quest to obtain state-ofthe-art government IDs for illegal immigrants. A recent want-ad in a Chicago-area Polish-language newspaper read "Drivers license in the State of New Mexico. Social Security not necessary. 100% guarantee." The latest victims of this scam are four men with Indian surnames who told authorities this month they shelled out hundreds of dollars to get a New Mexico license.

They were arrested on immigration charges instead.

And yet, New Mexico lawmakers like Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, contend that "this is not a system that is causing problems. It's a system that is preventing problems."

Apparently it's not a problem for the state to violate federal law. Or for a human smuggler to use the same address to book online license appointments for the 20 illegal immigrants he has sleeping on his Albuquerque floor at any a given time. Or to prey on illegal immigrants' fear and gouge them for hundreds of dollars for a license they could have gotten on their own for $18.

That's what Siraj A. "Sunny" Poonawala is accused of.

If the New Mexico Legislature is serious about "preventing problems," it will recognize this humanitarian travesty of its own making. It will listen to the concern voiced by Sen. William Sharer, R-Farmington, that "our driver's license currently is a compromised security document."

It will acknowledge that at a minimum a compromise along the lines of what Utah does makes sense - to issue driving permits rather than full licenses to illegal immigrants that still ensure they pass written and road tests and are entered in the state database, rather than provide the ability to board a plane to Manhattan.

It will toughen the Motor Vehicle Division's procedures for residency checks.

Yet even that compromise position exacerbates our schizophrenic immigration policy that demands the federal government secure the nation's borders while the state hands hand out driving privileges to folks who break immigration laws.

Martinez is pushing aggressively for a vote on this issue in part because she understands it's what the majority of New Mexico's voters want; a recent poll found 72 percent oppose the state's current driver's license policy.

Legislative Democrats would be very wise to heed this sentiment.

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