Tim May wrote:

http://vikingphoenix.com/immigration/davis_sign_illegal.htm

Does anybody remember 10+ years ago when a "Driver's License" wasn't quite a National ID Card or a Citizenship Credential or a Probably-Not-A-Deadbeat-Dad Right-to-Work Card, or a Homeland Security Internal Passport, or an Identity Theft Leverage Device, but merely intended to indicate that you knew how to drive? (OK, and that it was therefore ok for you to drink :-) There was a bit of control added in the mid 80s to reduce the extent to which people could ditch bad driving records by moving or by having multiple licenses simultaneously, but it was basically about driving. Pete Wilson, who as the CA electrical system market failure demonstrates, was a Social Conservative type Republican rather than a Fiscal Responsibility or Small Government type Republican, decided that it wasn't safe for people to drive while speaking Spanish, so he got the CA legislature to ban it. They gradually either became more liberal or more Spanish or influenced by different pressure groups and tried to change it, and Gray Davis at first opposed it before deciding he needed the votes of Mexican-Americans who were US citizens and changed his mind, and now people who should know better are ragging on him about it. I immigrated here to California about the time they were waffling back and forth about whether to require citizenship papers to be in order to get a driver's license or whether they'd accept a New Jersey driver's license.