At its core, a driver's license is just a government certification that you have passed a test showing that you are competent to drive a vehicle. The type of vehicle, be it car, motorcycle, or commercial vehicle, is generally designated as they are different skills. So what is the hullabaloo about giving driver's licenses to undocumented foreigners?
Just because a lot of people use a driver's license as identification doesn't make it an ID. The state of Texas does not have a copy of my birth certificate or any other indication that I am a citizen. All I had to do was take a 20-question test and convince a Texas Highway Patrol examiner that I knew the rules of the road and the basic things to start, drive, steer and stop a car. I also took the test in an automatic shift car, then later had to learn to drive a "stick" when my dad bought me a '49 Ford. No test for that.
How does that identify who I am? Frankly, it doesn't. In fact, my first license was paper, not plastic, and had no picture. I quickly learned that I could use a hole-punch, punch out the end number on the date of birth on my own license, do the same with another license and get a different number that I slipped into the hole in mine. Voila - I was over age 18 when the bartender asked. It's harder today, but not a lot. And the picture? I got my last driver's license picture taken clean-shaven, then later grew a beard. Not only did no one ever question it, when I renewed my license by mail they just used the old picture. Cheaper than keeping all those driver's license offices open, you see.
Did you know that by treaty since 1952 there are 160 nations that recognize each other's driver's licenses as government certification of competence to drive? Anyone licensed in any one of those 160 nations (which include Mexico, Canada and the U.S.) can use their driver's license in all of the others without taking a new test of getting a new license. The only issue is whether the local police can read the language the license uses, so international driver's licenses provide a translation into all UN languages plus six others. By reciprocal treaty, which is U.S. federal law, all 160 nations have to accept that certification of competence to drive.
I'm sure that the U.S. government could withdraw from all those treaties, but even the Bush administration would not be that stupid. It would mean that a tourist to Mexico, Europe or Canada who wanted to drive there would have to take the local driver's test and be licensed in each country they wanted to drive in. No more just flying in, renting a car and driving off. Take the local driver's license test first.
The problem is that the driver's license has taken on the fiction that it is a government document that proves identity and citizenship. But it isn't. The passport does those things, but the passport is not a certification of proof of competence to drive.
The real issue is about a national ID. Do we Americans want to give our government the right to force everyone of us to carry a national ID everywhere? Such a national ID would give the government a great deal of control of where each of us is and where we go. In the USSR it was called an "Internal passport." When you check into a hotel, your ID is reported to the local police.
I'm sure Russia continues to use the internal passport. It is administratively very convenient for a government that wants to control its population. Because it makes the job of controlling the population so much easier, it has often been proposed by conservatives in the U.S. - and always shot down. Even among conservatives it is considered an extremist idea. Governments, however, dream for the ease of tracking the population that a national ID offers.
The reaction to the repeated political defeat of the national ID has been to try to force the states to issued driver's licenses that are standardized using federal guidelines. That will make the state-issued driver's license into a defacto national ID. Conservatives can't get the national ID approved by legitimate legislation, so they are using a back door route by forcing the states to issue federal government-approved driver's licenses which are, in fact, a national ID.
If you trust your government to keep track of your every move, stand up and cheer. I trust them only to steal as much as they can, pass off tax money to their cronies, and then lie about their corruption and get testy when caught. Conservatives mostly, but even good Democrats have proven corruptible by the power and money that flows around them in Washington, D.C.
On the other side of the coin, the Republicans want to create a Berlin Wall around the U.S. so that no one can sneak in without permission. That is an impossible task, considering the length of both the Mexican and Canadian borders, as well as the population of at least 12,000,000 undocumented persons already here and established. They will fight the effort to issue a certification of competency to drive to undocumented persons because that is an admission of the total failure of their efforts to keep America "pure."
The borders cannot be totally closed. Drug smugglers on a daily basis keep proving that. There needs to be some trust that the Canadians can protect their own borders. They are in fact generally better at it than our government is. Mexico is also reasonably competent at controlling their borders. (Most actual smugglers travel legally in all three countries.) Tighter control on the national borders will be no more effective than having border stations between each of the 50 states would be. While I can accept the pleasures of keeping the primitives from Oklahoma from entering Texas without a passport, there are people in Sherman and Wichita Falls, TX who disagree. [Joke, Okies. Just an example. Now maybe keeping Cajuns out of Texas - no, no, I like the food and the accent.]
What is needed by the states is actually two different things. First, we need to make sure that everyone driving a vehicle inside the U.S. has valid certification of competence to drive as well as auto insurance.
Second, and separately, we need law enforcement that is focused on finding real threats to the U.S. rather than just chasing people for failure to carry valid ID. Giving state driver's licenses to otherwise undocumented immigrants will at least tell us who is on our highways, while ensuring that they have been certified by the state as competent to drive a vehicle and that they have insurance.
The undocumented immigrants who bother to obtain state driver's licenses are unlikely to be as great a threat to the U.S. as those who don't. That should assist law enforcement to identify the real threats to America. Cops could focus on those people without driver's licenses and be more likely to find real threats or criminals who are hiding out.
That's the best working solution. It will not satisfy the frightened conservatives who fear that immigrants are coming into the U.S. is such large numbers that they will swamp the American culture and replace it with (in the current case) the Mexican culture. There were greater threats in earlier days. I understand that there was serious consideration of making German the language of the American national government the beginning of America. Such a change is now certainly less possible than for America to accept the metric system of measurement.
Frightened people who object to people of another culture and language here in the U.S. will focus on the fact that many people from Mexico especially have not followed the overly restrictive immigration law and thus are "illegals." But the fact is, that those people will not swamp the American culture. Those are the people who left their own culture because the very dream of the American culture offered a greater promise to them than their original culture did. They wanted decent jobs that allowed them to have a family, and America offered those jobs when Mexico did not. In addition, their children can hope for a way of life impossible for most Mexican people. Without the interference of restrictive laws that keep their children from full participation in the American culture, those undocumented immigrants have in the past and will continue to become the most whole-hearted Americans here.
Those immigrants gave up the land of their birth because America looked better. They are the best of us, adventurous and for the most part, unafraid or able to deal with their fears of taking risks to better themselves and their families. We Americans, offering the myth that ours is a land of immigrants, promised them better than what they had and they took us up on that promise. We'd be fools to try to force them to leave.
And I'm with Elliot Spitzer. I'd really like all the people driving vehicles on our highways to be certified by a government as competent to drive and to have insurance. Of course, it would also be nice if they were sober, but that is a very separate issue, one that does not inherently involve undocumented immigrants.
No comments:
Post a Comment