Thursday, October 30, 2014

Why Congressional Candidate is Against Illegal Alien Driver's Licenses

Why I'm Against Measure 88

I’ve had personal experience with an arbitrary and incompetent immigration bureaucracy that desperately needs reform, and I am sympathetic with the idea that there are many, many hard-working immigrants who would benefit from some means to drive legally on Oregon’s roads while their immigration status is sorted out.  But Measure 88 goes far beyond addressing driving privileges, to grant a form of government-issued identification that, with limited exceptions, is “subject to the same statutes and procedures that govern driver’s licenses”.  For example, we recently learned that the Voter’s Pamphlet claim is wrong:  the cards can be used for identification on plane flights.
If the Legislature actually wanted to provide special permits so that aliens who needed to get to work, or even school, could drive on Oregon’s highways, the Legislature would simply expand the existing trip permit or hardship permit programs run by the Department of Motor Vehicles. And the Legislature would make sure that applicants for these limited permits had insurance—it is a trivial matter for DMV to verify any claimed insurance coverage with the insurance companies involved. Instead, the Measure would simply confer the benefits on all illegal aliens in Oregon, without serious regard to such questions as whether they are financially responsible for driving risks, have a specific need for driving rights, or even whether they are wanted criminals.
Worse still, the Measure is written with special care to make sure that issuance of the cards will not interfere with continued voting by illegal aliens. Everywhere we look, we find evidence that illegal aliens are voting in massive numbers, and are deciding close elections. It would have been a trivial matter for the Legislature to require that the Secretary of State strip from the voter rolls any applicants for these cards. Instead, the sponsors did exactly the opposite, declaring that the card could “only” be used for specified purposes such as child support enforcement, in substance forbidding Oregon officials from using the cards to clean up voter rolls.
For this reason, Measure 88 can be seen as part and parcel of a continuing and sinister effort to transform this country, by fraud and misrepresentation, in directions opposed by a majority of those lawfully entitled to determine its future. The Legislature can and should do better than this. The Legislature can narrow its grant of privileges, take an important opportunity to protect the integrity of Oregon’s elections, and craft a statute or ballot measure worthy of public support

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