Editorial: No license for illegal residents

Thursday, Jan. 31, 2002 | 8:43 a.m.

There is a movement afoot in Nevada to enable undocumented immigrants to legally possess one of this country's most treasured documents -- a driver's license. Bert Ramos, founder of Latinos in Politics, reasons that undocumented immigrants who pass the driver's license tests would render our roads safer, provide more money for the Department of Motor Vehicles, and even contribute to lower car insurance premiums because there would be fewer accidents.

Undocumented immigrants are here in vast numbers and they are here to stay. States can passively ignore them and put public safety at risk or they can accept that they're here and begin treating them as citizens. So the argument goes. Utah has bought into it. The California Legislature has bought into it, although Gov. Gray Davis has not yet signed a bill into law.

Should Nevada, which has 60,000 to 125,000 undocumented immigrants, follow suit? There are good arguments for bestowing quasi-citizenship on those who entered the country illegally. Federal immigration laws are dense and cases are backlogged for years. Applying for legal immigration is time consuming, when the need to work is immediate. Undocumented immigrants continue to arrive because they are generally welcomed by businesses whose needs for manual labor are not otherwise being met. But it is not good public policy when an official state action renders a federal law all but meaningless. Immigration policy is a national issue for Congress to decide. It should not evolve through piecemeal state actions.

Ramos' motivation is understandable. He would be doing a greater public service, however, by engaging federal lawmakers to rework immigration law. There are proposals now on the table for a U.S.-Mexico guest-worker program and his thoughts about how it should work would be valuable. Under a program where people needing long-term work could enter the country quickly and legally, immigrant workers would be more than welcome to go stand in the long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles.