Commentary ––

Aliens Should Not Get Licenses So Easily

By Chris Powell

Pardon the state Motor Vehicles Department for wanting to issue driver’s licenses only to people who can show that they are in the country legally and authorized to stay here for more than a year.

When the department tried to hold a hearing on such rules a month ago in Waterbury, some immigrants protested being treated as less than full citizens, and a few of them and their supporters rioted. Another DMV hearing in Hartford the other day went off peacefully, but not without a lot of sanctimony from aliens and their advocates.

They may have had a point when they complained that the department’s rules are confusing and unevenly applied by employees who don’t seem to understand the rules. But the aliens and their advocates were aggrieved that the department was applying to driver’s license applicants any test of legal residency at all. As one of their advocates, Shannon Jacovino of the Stamford Organization Project, said of DMV officials, “I don’t think it’s their place to act as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.”

But if citizenship is to mean anything, aliens must be treated as something less than citizens, and somebody should act as the INS, because the INS sure doesn’t.

The country is being flooded with aliens, most of them illegal, a few of them engaged in terrorism, and still the INS can’t be bothered. When Connecticut police arrest illegal aliens and charge them criminally and call the INS expecting enforcement action, the INS expresses indifference. In effect, immigration law has been repealed by the refusal of the INS to enforce it.

Meanwhile news organizations all over the country have been reporting since last September 11 about the ease of obtaining driver’s licenses, the most basic form of identification, under false pretenses. After the INS itself, motor vehicles agencies may be the greatest single abettor of violations of immigration law, and of terrorism.

Yes, the Motor Vehicles Department should make its regulations clear and apply them consistently. But state government should not be making it easy for aliens to be where they don’t have a legal right to be and to do what they have no right to do, including the right to work. Let aliens first establish themselves in the country in conformance with the law and provide the documentation to prove it. The country is so liberal in this respect that even amid a war of terrorism there will be plenty of immigrants.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)