I would like to thank New York Assemblyman Ed Ra and New York state Sen. Ann Kaplan for understanding why giving illegal aliens access to driver’s licenses is a bad idea and voting no on two bills.
I appreciate their respect for the law and not wanting to reward people who break the law, as well as listening to the law enforcement community and their constituents to try and stop these bills from passing. I find it quite disturbing that these bills ultimately passed.
When you combine the new driver’s license bill to allow using hard-to-verify foreign documents and the governor’s executive order that state police troopers or officers with other state law enforcement agencies will not be allowed to question people about their citizenship or residency, you have created the ultimate smoke screen for illegal behavior. Also, the message it sends out is that the value of citizenship has now been reduced to nothing more than personhood. I find the arguments that this was a good idea put forth by the New York Civil Liberties Union in newspaper ads and the other usual groups, which conflate illegal and legal immigrant issues, hard to accept as true.
How do our insurance premiums go down or road safety improve overall when a gigantic new pool of high-risk drivers is now on the road? How about the increase in traffic congestion that will occur? Also, another main point was that driver’s licenses are needed to get to work. Employers are not supposed to hire illegal aliens by verifying their Social Security number. With this new law the driver’s license agency now just lets them sign that they have not been issued a Social Security number to allow them to get the license to go to work.
Why are we allowing one agency to work against a significant fraud deterrent used to protect the labor market? Lastly, New York state has voting registration linked to the DMV. While the DMV does not approve or deny voter registration applications, it only sends the application to the county or city Board of Elections for their review. It has now placed an undue burden on this other agency to try and keep illegal aliens from being registered to vote. I am thoroughly disappointed that New York progressives consider this an improvement to living in New York state and thankful that these legislators voted to try to stop us from being forced to live in an upside down world.
Chris Wales
Mineola
