REAL ID pushed through strong opposition

Washington Hoy 9-11 attacks and driver licence (click to enlarge) Washington Hoy 05/13/2005 Riding on a supplemental appropriations bill for Afghanistan and Irak, the White House backed REAL ID Act became law this Wednesday, after President Bush signed the measure. Supporters have championed the REAL ID Act as a border security and antiterrorist measure, whose aims will be atained by forcing states to meet federal standards for their driver’s licenses which could never be issued to undocumented immigrants, difficulting even more the process for obtaining political asylum, and finishing the building of a wall on the border between Mexico and San Diego, California. “This legislation is aimed at preventing another 9/11-type attack by disrupting terrorist travel and bolstering our border security,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. Republican from Wisconsin. “Giving drivers’ licenses that can be used as identification to anyone, regardless of whether they are here legally or whether we know who they really are, is an open invitation for terrorists and criminals to exploit,” said Sensenbrenner. However, some 600 civil rights groups, immigrant advocacy organizations, unions, and the Democrats as a whole oppose the measure, and found the claims of increased security baseless. “The restrictions on immigration in the Real ID Act are not necessary to protect national security. Rather they will only serve to create serious and unjustified hardships on people fleeing persecution, and also for other non-citizens,” said Democrat, Russ Feingold. Washington Hoy Who would be affected ? (click to enlarge) Those groups insist that the provisions in the Act would not have stopped the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. And Latino groups perceive the real goal of these measures, which have been proposed several times under very different circumstances over the years, not as efforts to stop a terrorist attack, but to stop Mexicans, and others from Latin America, from entering the country. “We want attention brought to the poorest borders because of the consequences of what I call the Trojan Horse Invasion primarily from Mexico,” said James Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, the group of citizens patrolling the Arizona border, when he, his supporters and other anti-immigration activists came to Capitol Hill a few weeks ago to pressure lawmakers to keep the Real ID Act in the supplemental. “Maybe Arizona, California and Nevada will become all Hispanic and they would literally break off from the United States socially and politically and possibly through a blood war in another 40 years,” Gilchrist said. Critics say under the provision, millions of undocumented aliens will be prohibited from getting driver’s licenses, and motor vehicles registration bureaus across the United States will, in effect, be turned into immigration enforcement offices. Senator Joe Lieberman, for one, criticized the provision in the bill as “rigid and unworkable,” -- a view shared by many of his Democratic colleagues. Angela Kelley, Deputy Director of the National Immigration Forum, expressed her deep dissapointment with the Bush Administration’s unequivocal embracement of punitive measures that link all immigrants to terrorists and that will deny those seeking refuge from religious oppression a safe haven on our shores. “This President has painstakingly raised expectations in immigrant communities that he would fight for realistic and enforceable, common-sense solutions to our broken immigration system,” said Kelley. “Now he has delivered a sucker-punch to immigrant communities by turning-tail and promoting the same types of ineffective, enforcement-only policies that have proven so completely ineffective at securing our borders.”