Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
Licenses as IDs at airports questioned
WASHINGTON Federal officials and lawmakers raised serious concerns Tuesday about the continued use of driver's licenses at airports and U.S. borders in light of California's new law allowing illegal immigrants to obtain the widely accepted means of identification.
California's law against Driving While Speaking Spanish is only about 10 years old, and was a Pete Wilson thing. It happened about when I moved here - did other states start doing similar things in the mean time? The Feds started bullying states into collecting SSNs when issuing drivers' licenses in the mid 80s, ostensibly as a way of preventing duplicate registrations, but I hadn't heard they'd been doing this.
Davis had refused to sign such a law before, citing homeland security concerns. His about-face was questioned by some as a move to garner support in the Latino community. "Homeland Security"? Back when Pete Wilson was State Reptile, he was at least only claiming it was to make it hard for illegal immigrants to come here and compete for jobs and get welfare, but wasn't pretending they were a threat.
excerpts from http://www2.ocregister.com/ocrweb/ocr/article.do?id=56388§ion=NEWS&subsection=NEWS&year=2003&month=9&day=10