By Margaret D. Stock
Margaret D. Stock is an immigration attorney and a lieutenant colonel, Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve. She is a part-time associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The views expressed here are her own.
Last month, Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced that - in the interest of public safety and security, and with the added bonus of lowering car insurance rates - he was changing New York State Department of Motor Vehicles policy to allow resident immigrants to apply for driver's licenses. Instead of needing a Social Security number, as had been the previous policy, immigrants without them will be able to use a current and valid passport to prove their identities, in addition to providing four other points of identification.
The governor's announcement was met with a firestorm from critics who claim that granting licenses to unauthorized immigrants will encourage terrorism. Last week, certain lawmakers in Albany vowed to fight the policy. But this reactionary rationale flies in the face of the facts. Spitzer's policy change is actually a win for security, because it gives law enforcement the tools needed to identify and find terrorists and criminals.
Gov. George Pataki's administration denied driver's licenses to people who could not prove their lawful immigration status. As a result, hundreds of thousands of New York's immigrants have been unable to obtain licenses. Under Spitzer's changes, the DMV will be insisting that immigrants provide a current and valid passport that can be verified using new state-of-the-art document scanning workstations. The agency will establish the first-of-its-kind document verification unit, staffed by specially trained DMV personnel, to verify the associated points of identification that will corroborate an unauthorized immigrant's current and valid passport (in contrast to the over-the-counter-process for other applicants).
Finally, the DMV will be implementing technology that will compare the photograph of every applicant against the database of photographs in the current system to make sure an applicant is not able to fraudulently get more than one license.
In spite of these new security measures, the baseless criticism that giving driver's licenses to immigrants will somehow give terrorists a license to attack the United States has gone unquestioned by many.
Politicians opposing the new change have tried to use 9/11 as their primary reason. But these are the facts: The 9/11 terrorists didn't need driver's licenses to hijack airplanes - they all had passports, having been admitted to the United States on visas. We know that at least one of them - and probably others - used his passport to board aircraft on 9/11. Terrorists could still do that today. Moreover, they did not need state-issued driver's licenses to rent cars. All they needed was a license from their home country, or international driving permits, just as many foreign drivers use today in America.
But although the driver's licenses were not key to the terrorist attacks, they were instrumental in the post-incident investigations, according to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. Data from terrorists' driver's licenses - like photographs, personal addresses and traffic records - allowed investigators to figure out where the terrorists had been and with whom they had associated.
Data from driver's licenses is similarly used in thousands of criminal and terrorism investigations every year, in New York State and elsewhere. When someone is inside the United States already and is sought by law enforcement officials, the DMV database is the first place those officials often look. The fewer people who are in it, the less useful it is.
For this reason, the 9/11 Commission did not recommend that DMVs should deny licenses to unauthorized immigrants. Instead, the commission recommended improving the security of licenses and carefully checking the identity of those who apply for them - exactly what Spitzer has now ordered the New York DMV to do with the implementation of a new regime of security measures such as document scanning software and photo comparison technology.
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