Support shown to broaden laws for licenses

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Monday, Feb. 4, 2002 | 9:52 a.m.

A move to help undocumented immigrants get their Nevada driver's licenses is gaining momentum in Clark County.

State Sen. Maggie Carlton, D-Las Vegas, and Assemblywoman Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, have sought information on the issue and have expressed tentative support for a measure to broaden the types of identification immigrants can use at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The Nevada Hispanic Democratic Caucus, based in Las Vegas, is pushing the issue with candidates it plans to endorse.

In addition, staff members from Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., attended a briefing with the legislators and the caucus last week on a similar law already passed in Utah.

The Utah legislation, passed in 1997, allows undocumented immigrants to use a federal taxpayer identification number to obtain a driver's license, instead of a Social Security card, which they are not able to legally obtain.

Carlton has seen the need firsthand.

Hispanics who work with Carlton at the Treasure Island hotel-casino, where she is a waitress, have been asking her for months about the ability to get a license in Utah, she said.

"For them, it's a community issue, since even though they might be citizens, they have friends or family members who are not -- and need to drive," she said.

More importantly, said Andres Ramirez, chairman of the caucus, such a law would reduce the number of unlicensed and uninsured drivers on the road.

That's the reason the proposal was first floated by Bert Ramos, founder of Latinos in Politics, a Northern Nevada Republican coalition.

Ramos would like legislation to require immigrants to apply for permanent residency or citizenship, but the Southern Nevada movement doesn't think a bill should include that.

"We see this as a public safety issue," Ramirez said. "The point is that the undocumented immigrants in our state are here, they're working, they're driving to get to work, and anytime there's an accident involving them, they don't have insurance. This not only creates unsafe roads, but helps drive insurance rates up."

A key factor in passing the Utah legislation was a study showing that one-fourth of all accidents in the state involved uninsured drivers, Mike Martinez, a Utah attorney who worked on the legislation, said.

"It was clear that many of these uninsured drivers were undocumented immigrants," he said.

Similar legislation has been proposed in Illinois, Colorado, Georgia and California. The California Legislature even passed a bill in August, but Gov. Gray Davis has not signed it because of concerns about security.

He's not the only one.

The proposals come at a time when motor vehicle departments nationwide want to standardize the process of obtaining a driver's license along stricter lines -- including making it difficult for undocumented immigrants to apply.

The national American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators is pushing the move, which it calls "closing loopholes," as a way of fighting terrorism since Sept. 11. They don't want people who have overstayed their visas, as some of the al-Qaida terrorists did, to have an easy way to blend into American society.

Supporters of the eased rules say they actually would provide a better way to track immigrants. The Utah driver's licenses even indicate if a taxpayer number was used as identification to obtain the license.

Since 1997 Utah has granted about 60,000 licenses a year based on the taxpayer number, Barton Blackstock, chief of the Utah Driver Services Bureau, said.

He added that some of these licenses were probably given to people from other states, since Utah also doesn't require applicants to prove residency in the state -- including immigrants crossing the border from Nevada.

Utah can provide an example for Nevada legislators, Carlton said.

"When Utah, a fairly conservative state, passed its law, an appropriate political precedent was set. If California passes its measure, it tells me even more so that we need to look at this issue," she said.