| Tuesday, June 28, 2005 |
11:36 - The DMV: the New Ellis Island
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Evidently the same people in the California Assembly who have twice failed to pass legislation allowing driver's licenses for illegal immigrants are going to try a third time, thinking they have the Governator's support (though they don't, really, judging by his reactions reported on the radio this morning). This time, reportedly, they plan to distinguish illegals' licenses (a contradiction in terms, it seems to me) with a unique color and special security features, but the California Homeland Security department still isn't pleased. Which seems about right to me, but I can't help but think it's absurd that the question has even gotten this far.
Let's leave aside the philosophical question at the heart of whether it's right to give the legitimacy of documentation to people who are in this country illegally, who cheated the system to sneak in where others spent years in line waiting.
My question is a more basic one. It's about logistics. See, what people seem to be forgetting, perhaps because of the monotonic overuse of the term, is that these are illegal immigrants we're talking about. IL-LEG-GAL. As in, criminals. As in, they should not be here. As in, if the authorities find out they exist, they deport them. (Or should.) The life of an illegal immigrant is a life of hiding from all forms of authority, of lying low, of staying the hell away from any mode of detection by those with the power to discover that they have no right to be in the country. It's a life of skulking from under-the-counter job to under-the-counter job, seeking a living from sympathetic or (more frequently) exploitative employers willing to be party to the crime. It's all underground, and documentation is the very antithesis of the enterprise.
With that in mind, then: why on earth would an illegal immigrant go to the DMV to pick up a license, or even provide a mailing address to have one sent him?
Wouldn't this be like a Venus flytrap or something—just set up a special line at the DMV with a door in the back wall saying "Illegal Immigrant Licenses", and as each person steps through he falls onto a chute that carries him into a paddy-wagon idling in the sub-basement? If so, it'd be rather ingenious.
Or—as seems more likely—does this proposal merely amount to the decriminalization of undocumented immigration? If, as a self-demonstrated international criminal, you can walk with impunity into a government office and get official state documentation with your name and your address imprinted and reflected in a government database, instead of being arrested on the spot, then in what sense is illegal immigration "illegal" anymore?
It's like, say, if a notorious bank robber were to walk into a police station, and under a bulletin board with his name and portrait staring down at him from a WANTED poster, he told the cops about a neighbor whose music was turned up too loud. And the cops took down a police report and knocked down the neighbor's door. And the bank robber walked out happily into the sunshine.
It's hard for me to understand how the proponents of driver's licenses for illegals can have any other ultimate goal than the destruction of the concept of "citizenship".
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Brian Tiemann
