Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 20, 2002
By ELIZABETH LLORENTE, Staff Writer

Oscar Roldan had no business driving in New Jersey.

For his first seven years in the country, the young Mexican stayed out of the driver's seat, heeding laws, including New Jersey's, that require licensed drivers to be in the United States legally. He got to his job collecting garbage by hitching rides from his home in Jersey City or, more often, walking 30 minutes to get there by the 3 a.m. start time.

But in 1999, his employer moved to Totowa and the garbage workers became unionized. The job would pay more than twice his existing minimum-wage salary - but was now more than an hour's drive away.

Needing to support a wife and three young children, all born in New Jersey, the choice for Roldan was clear. As hundreds of other illegal immigrants in New Jersey have done, he bought an old junker and drove it anyway.

"Driving is not a luxury, it's a necessity," says Roldan, now 32 and approved for legal permanent U.S. residency. "We should be able to get a license if we show we know how to drive and know the state's driving laws. Since they don't allow us, we feel forced to drive illegally."

Throughout the United States - a nation dependent on the labor of illegal immigrants yet ambivalent about their legal status - a movement has been building to allow undocumented residents to have one of the most important documents available, a state driver's license.

Advocates say licensing will help make certain that only skilled and insured drivers are on the roads. Opponents say granting the right to licenses would reward lawbreakers.

Last summer, the nation's mood toward illegal immigrants was at its friendliest in decades. President Bush had raised Mexico's profile as a crucial partner of the United States and championed efforts to upgrade the status of undocumented Mexican workers in this country.

Some states - Virginia, North Carolina, and Michigan among them - were already implicitly allowing illegal immigrants to get licenses by accepting forms of identification not contingent on legal U.S. residency.

North Carolina, for example, accepts the Taxpayer Identification Number issued by the Internal Revenue Service and used by many undocumented immigrants, who are ineligible for Social Security numbers. Michigan gives licenses to immigrants who can produce ID cards issued by the Mexican Consulate.

The time seemed right to push hard in New Jersey and elsewhere to allow legal licenses for illegal immigrants.

On Sept. 11, that momentum vanished. The terrorist attacks focused a harsh spotlight on all illegals in the country, who may number more than 9 million. In the backlash, many stateshave adopted or proposed regulations that would explicitly preclude illegal immigrants from obtaining licenses.

Revelations in The Record that many of New Jersey's estimated 300,000 illegal immigrants are driving with black-market licenses dovetailed with the discovery that 13 of the 19 terrorist hijackers had U.S. driver's licenses or state IDs.

Thanks to driver's licenses, federal investigators say, many of the hijackers were able to open bank accounts, rent cars and apartments, and board airplanes.

Nonetheless, the movement to grant licenses to undocumented immigrants, most of whom come from Latin America, is picking up steam again.

Several hundred immigrants and their advocates rallied in Trenton on May 2 to demand that New Jersey drop its requirement of a legal U.S. presence.

Also this month, two leading lobbies on immigration matters released position papers. While predictable in their advocacy - the National Council of La Raza, which supports immigrant rights, backs giving them licenses, and the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict immigration control and tougher enforcement, opposes them - the papers still focused fresh attention on the issue.

And in California and Missouri, campaigns are under way to allow immigrants with taxpayer ID numbers and proof of state residency to obtain licenses.

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, which represents the state agencies that issue licenses, wants Congress to resolve the issue, rather than leave it up to each state. Since the attacks, the AAMVA has urged national uniformity on everything from license design to the paperwork required to obtain a license.

"The issue is bigger than us," says AAMVA spokesman Jason King, referring to his Virginia-based association. "There are a number of illegal immigrants here in the country - we know that. Do we license them or not? It's an area where we need to have uniform practices, a national policy."

Immigrant advocates are using the new security concerns to bolster their contention that everyone would benefit from granting illegal immigrants this legal recognition. Permitting driver's licenses, they say, would bring a shadow population onto the radar screen.

"This would only help national security," says Jesus Galvis, a Hackensack councilman and director of the Bergen County Hispanic Advisory Commission. "As long as they're here, shouldn't we know who they are, and make sure they're insured and that they have gone through the license application process? Don't we want to know that they know our driving laws? They're on the road, right next to us, every day."

Indeed, the advocates argue that New Jersey's strict laws are failing to keep illegal residents from driving.

Simply forbidding illegal immigrants to drive "doesn't mean that they're not on the road," says Jennifer Ching, head of the Immigrant Workers Rights Project for the American Civil Liberties Union in New Jersey.

"They are on the road. The impact is that they're unlicensed, and in that I include the many drivers who have fraudulently gotten state licenses,'' says Ching, who is a leader in the campaign to allow illegal residents to get licenses. "This means we have many uninsured drivers, and that costs this country millions and millions of dollars."

Roldan recalls how worried he was about driving around without a license. He pored over a New Jersey driver's manual before buying his 1985 Ford Mustang a few years ago.

"I read over and over every part," he says. "The last thing I wanted was be pulled over by a police officer and found out. You're tense when you drive that way."

His worst fears materialized one day in Paterson, when a police officer pulled him over for a routine check.

Roldan says he appealed to the officer's sympathy.

"I told him I was just driving to get to my job, to feed my children. The police officer was nice about it. He told me I should get my papers, get a license, and he told me to drive carefully."

New Jersey "is a state where you need a car to move around,'' agrees Diana Mejia of Wind of the Spirit, a Morristown group that provides assistance to immigrants.

"It's also a state where undocumented immigrants are a necessary component of the economy, and they need to drive to get to those jobs that keep small businesses alive.

"They need to drive to the jobs that we all depend on them to do. Who washes your car, mows your lawn, takes care of your children, cleans your house, does the renovation work in your house? Chances are, morely likely than not, it's an illegal immigrant."

Opponents, however, say allowing illegal immigrants to obtain licenses rewards them for breaking this nation's laws.

They say Sept. 11 showed that the United States must keep identification documents such as driver's licenses out of the hands of foreigners.

Rep. Marge S. Roukema, a Ridgewood Republican who often takes tough stances on immigration, says she believes that allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses would threaten national security.

"How can anyone talk about giving a law-breaking population opportunities like getting a driver's license?" Roukema asks. "We should be talking about finding them and deporting them, not giving them things like driver's licenses."

Opponents also object to the message they believe would be sent if undocumented immigrants were permitted to hold valid U.S. driver's licenses.

That "would be a step toward a creeping amnesty program," says Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

"These kinds of benefits for people who have broken the laws to come here point to a normalization of illegal immigration. It would indicate a growing acceptance of illegal immigration as just another way of coming to the United States.''

Ching, the ACLU official, says she realizes her cause is much more difficult to push since the terrorist attacks.

"It's going to require educating the larger community about immigrants and the driver's license,'' she says. "We were getting broad support in the nation before Sept. 11."

In Morristown, a Costa Rican living here on a valid visa hooks up illegal immigrants with license brokers who steer them through the Division of Motor Vehicles to get real licenses. He himself paid a broker $2,600 for his license.

"Illegal immigrants would rather do things aboveboard," says the man, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"They're having accidents and fleeing the scene because they don't know how to drive, they can't go to driving schools because they ask for proof of legal U.S. residency, and they're afraid the cops will catch on to the fact that they don't have licenses or that they're bought.

"No one is benefiting from that. No one benefits except for people who are running the black market that provides them with the licenses. The result of strict laws is corruption and dangerous roads."

Staff Writer Elizabeth Llorente's e-mail address is llorente@northjersey.com
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