Feds complicate state residency rules

In his opinion piece “Maine license proposal inadequate” (BDN, Feb. 26), Robert Casimiro vents his frustration that it has been six long years since the Sept. 11 attacks and here we are still issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

His voiced concerns illustrate beautifully the confusion in the public over this important issue.

To begin with, America’s initial efforts in the wake of the terrorist attack had nothing to do with illegal immigration. Those efforts were about stopping terrorism. This is an extraordinarily important point: Not one of the hijackers on Sept. 11 entered the U.S. with a driver’s license. Indeed, they were granted visas by the U.S. State Department. Later, they used their passports and visas to obtain other credentials, including driver’s licenses. None of them was an illegal immigrant.

Sen. Susan Collins, then chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, successfully shepherded thoughtful legislation – the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 – through Congress which placed states on a serious and committed path to better security of state driver’s licenses. That component called for a nationwide group of state stakeholders – including Maine – to develop minimum standards for licenses.

While that effort since has been derailed by the divisive efforts around Real ID, two specific charges of that rulemaking group presciently inform the current debate: The group was to neither recommend a national identity card, nor engage in immigration policy. The reasons? No one in Congress wanted a national ID card, and immigration law is the purview of the federal government.

Contrary to what Casimiro says, a few years make a huge difference. Congress – through a brilliant parliamentary maneuver – reversed itself and passed Real ID. This convoluted law not only costs billions (which Homeland Security explains isn’t federally funded because driver’s licenses are the states’ problem), and not only is it a vast landscape of privacy concerns, but it won’t work. Under the final rules issued by Homeland Security this winter, the Sept. 11 attackers still would get state driver’s licenses.

Since 2004, Maine has enacted a number of security laws mandating that an applicant for a driver’s license provide a Social Security number or proof of ineligibility and that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles may not accept any expired document of foreign origin as an identity document. I asked state Rep. Boyd Marley, D-Portland, House chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Transportation, to submit pending legislation that would establish a residency requirement in order to obtain a Maine driver’s license.

The residency requirement will close the window of opportunity for much fraud. Some claim the measure doesn’t go far enough because it lacks a “legal presence” requirement. If the federal government, which controls who enters our country, were to issue a list of documents that would be used to establish lawful immigration status, such a proposal would be child’s play to implement. But no such list exists, and states are left to figure out on their own what an illegal immigrant – or an American citizen – really is.

This sounds simple enough to figure out without federal guidance. But in its seemingly simple and foolproof legal presence requirement, the commonwealth of Virginia is grappling with proposed reforms to its law in the wake of the public embarrassment of not being able to issue a decorated veteran of World War II a driver’s license because he couldn’t prove legal presence status.

If legal presence, like most of Casimiro’s concerns, is largely a legal fiction, state residency is not. We know what it means and we know how to enforce it. While it will not solve every problem, it will make fraud more difficult to perpetrate and our licenses more secure. We owe the people of Maine no less.

Matthew Dunlap of Old Town is Maine’s secretary of state and was a member of the Negotiated Rulemaking Committee to Establish Minimum Standards for State-issued Driver’s Licenses and Identity Cards under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.