Views collide over driver law

A New Mexico law that allows for undocumented immigrants to receive state-issued driver’s licenses has come under fire with bipartisan support to reverse the law. The state legislature will make a decision about the policy at its upcoming session.
Donald Gluck, president of UNM College Republicans, said allowing illegal immigrants to have a state-issued identification card is a national security issue. He said the policy also puts elections at risk because voter registration is often completed when someone receives a driver’s license.

“The prime means of identification during airport screening is the driver’s license,” Gluck said. “Airport security personnel cannot tell if a person with a New Mexico license is a U.S. citizen or a foreign national. This is important information needed to make security assessments.”

Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said policymakers should be focused instead on how the law protects citizens.

“If (immigrants) are not allowed to get a license, they may still have to drive to get to work, especially in a state like New Mexico that doesn’t have a lot of public transportation,” Wilkes said. “So what do they do? They drive without a license. That’s not good for anybody.”

Wilkes continued: “The real victims here are the ones who are pushing the laws: the people who get into an accident with someone without insurance or someone who leaves the scene of an accident. And a direct consequence of whether (immigrants) are

allowed to get insurance is if they have a license.”
An Albuquerque Journal poll found that 72 percent of voters said they oppose New Mexico’s driver’s license policy, Gabriel R. Sanchez, UNM political science assistant professor, said the Arizona immigration has had little effect on immigrants leaving Arizona to get a driver’s license in New Mexico. He said the policy’s upcoming deadline might be the culprit.

“A lot of people are assuming that it is because they’re folks from Arizona coming over here, but it’s impossible to know that because the MVD doesn’t track it,” Sanchez said. “There are probably a lot of folks that are New Mexicans, documented or not, that are saying, ‘Wait a minute. If I have been waiting to (get a driver’s license) it is probably a pretty good time to do it, because they will probably close the policy.’ I think that has been completely left out.”

Historically, Sanchez said, immigration always becomes a hot-button issue in a period of economic struggle.

“Every time the economy goes south, whoever the immigrant population is at that time has felt a lot of public pressure, like the Irish and the Italians in other generations,” he said. “It’s been the Japanese and Chinese in a different period of history. Now, it just happens to be Latinos or Latin Americans.”