On Wednesday, September 10, 2003, at 09:38 AM, 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.

"If driver's licenses are given to people who are illegally in the country, then that puts extra burdens and difficulties on our inspectors at the border," Hutchinson said. "If you don't have integrity in the driver's licenses that are issued, then it really undermines the whole premise of allowing U.S. citizens to travel abroad and come back with limited proof of U.S. citizenship, without a passport."

There has never been any "integrity" (in OS/capabilities/verification terms) in the driver's license issuance. Not in any of the three states I have requested and gotten DLs in has there ever been the slightest attempt to verify who I say I am (lacking is-a-person credentials, this would be difficult anyway).

The wisdom of using driver's licenses for identification was also questioned Tuesday in a congressional watchdog report that found that fraudulent licenses are passing muster at airports, border crossings and motor-vehicle offices. The full report by the General Accounting Office has been classified for security reasons. But in public testimony prepared for the Senate Finance Committee, Robert Cramer, director of GAO's office of special investigations, warned about relying on driver's licenses for identification.

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.

Our first Mexican governor expects to add an estimated 525,000 former illegal aliens to the Democrap voter base in California. BTW, having briefly volunteered at a "register to vote" table a while back, I can assure you all that we never asked for any ID whatsoever upon taking the completed forms, that many of those who registered were obviously too recent in arrival in the U.S. to be legally qualifed to be citizens, let alone voters, and that many of those I "registered" (*) had essentially no knowledge of anything political. (* I did not actually "register" them...that happens somewhere back when the form I collected from them is processed by the DP center and entered into the big computer. Do the staffers in Sacramento make efforts to verify addresses or to cross-check with Immigration and Naturalization? Do you want to buy a bridge? Once the forms are sent in, registration is a foregone conclusion.) --Tim May