I’ve just read this article on a Libertarian site, and had a gander at the Wiki article, but I’m only slightly the wiser. I’m hoping Dopers can enlighten me as to the Act and why certain States like Montana and S Carolina object to it.
Mods: I’m placing this in GD because I can see it becoming contentious very quickly.
While tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists and Libertarians (like me) might object on philosophical grounds, the states basically object because it will cost them money.
It’s a money thing. Originally states issued little pieces of paper with no photograph that certified that you were competant to drive a car. Nothing more nothing less.
Now this has turned into a law enforcement task with fraud prevention measures and a whole boatloat of new requirements under REAL ID act. An people still demand that the licenses cost $10 to $20, while the states have to invest millions more into the system.
For sparsely populated states like Montana or Wyoming, it’s rather onerous.
Around here, there are about 30 DMV offices within 50 miles of where I’m sitting, but in Montana, there really aren’t any dedicated facilities other than at the state capital, so you may first need to go to a county treasurer’s office to get a pre-paid receipt for your license, then go to the nearest county that has DMV services. But be mindful of the schedule! For the most part, it’s a matter of going to the county courthouse on their schedule - something like the second Wednesday of each month, from 10 AM to 2 PM.
Worse, Real ID is an unfunded mandate. The Feds say “You will do it our way” but provide no money to do it with. Among other hugely expensive requirements being dropped on the states are that they must maintain databases of all of the documents people use to establish their identity. eg: Social Security card and birth certificate. Also, rather than simply trusting that these are authentic, the states are supposed to validate everything against Federal databases such as SSOLV (Social Security On-Line Verification) and EVVE (Electronic Verification of Vital Events)
What **jtgain ** and gotpasswords said. Making things worse, many states over the 90s/early 00s had ** already ** sunk a sizable investment into computerized Driver License/Liquor Board ID systems, with their corresponding administrative procedures, database standards and protocols and formats, usually designed to make things easier and more efficient for the drivers… and now the Feds decide to impose from above a whole new and different set of requirements, designed to please the requirements of DoHS, an agency that has done a heckuva job of squandering the public’s respect and trust. (And besides the sparsely populated states, the densely populated ones face the cost of redoing huge already-installed legacy systems) Consider also how you will now create yet ANOTHER huge database of verified names/addresses/birth certificates/social security numbers for someone to be careless about and misplace the disk with half the state’s idenitites in it.
From the more strict-libertarian POV as suggested by Paul, there is also the issue that imposing REAL-ID onto the states (under the threat that your state’s DL will be useless for boarding an airplane or entering a federal facility) looks to many like a way to pressure the states into eventually asking the Feds to go ahead and create a National ID – which has otherwise been a quire unpopular idea – just so the burden’s taken off of the local jursidictions. REAL-ID was not even approved as a self-standing piece of legislation, it was logrolled into a bill for tsunami relief and paying for the military (Makes one wonder what would become of Congress if it were required to observe the same “single issue” rule as a majority of state legislatures).
Besides the other items mentioned, the specifications/requirements as outlined are pretty vague, IIRC. It’s just ripe for feature creep and cost overruns, practically a model of how not to get a system implemented, IMHO. But the main reason States are against it AFAICT is the unfunded mandate issue. Perhaps this is just cynicism, but if there was no cost involved, I can’t imagine many in public office not wanting it.
We had a thread on this back in January, if anyone is interested: US National ID to be required - good idea or bad?
We’re all getting barcodes tattooed on our foreheads sooner or later, just accept it.
I have a cynical view of this. From wiki:
Governments in states where illegal immigration is not a major problem don’t want to do the Fed’s job for free and states with a lot of illegal immigration owe their position to the perceived (except in Arizona probably real) voting power of illegal immigrants and the VERY real political pressure of immigrants for what they view as racist policies (apparently being anti-ILLEGAL immigration is racist)
And government employees are not properly trained to determine people’s U.S. immigration status, even in areas where illegal immigration ISN’T a huge issue. There are scores of different legal immigration statuses, and even more different combinations of documents that can prove that a person is in the U.S. legally.
More than once I’ve (unsuccessfully) tried to help clients do battle with the DMV to get something that they are legally entitled to, but couldn’t manage to get some low-level bureaucrat to comprehend that, say, the spouse of a multinational manager on a perfectly legal L-2 blanket visa isn’t going to have a Social Security number, because she isn’t eligible for one unless she applies for work authorization (which she is also eligible for, but takes time to receive, and why should she have to apply for it if she doesn’t want to work?), but that doesn’t mean she is in the U.S. illegally.
State employees often don’t have the skills to deal with that stuff, and state agencies have enough on their plates without having to train employees in a complex body of law, especially when the Federal agency that is tasked with doing so can barely keep its head above water.
Eva Luna, U.S. Immigration Paralegal
And what Eva Luna mentions also reminds me another detail, which is that State transportation and police officials had already been working on developing uniform interstate DL standards and in some aspects this may mean back to square one.
And Saint Cad, what I’ve heard from many of the state officials is that part of their problem is that specially in rural and poor areas of the country, many native-born-in-the-USA Americans, specially older or poorer, do not have easy access to paperwork that proves their legal status, and it becomes onerous upon them to have to contact their county of birth and look up the records. Legal immigrants, OTOH, usually have all their papers squared away! Yet as** Eva ** suggests, even in states where an inmigrant presence is well-established it’s a hassle to get all the ducks in a row.
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(BTW, illegal aliens can’t vote. Many Hispanic American citizens don’t like some anti-illegal-alien measures, for our own reasons. Start hassling anglophone caucasians on a daily basis to prove they’re not illegal Canadians and we’ll talk)
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In the end, it all comes down to the unfortunate “mission creep” that affected the Driving Licenses in the USA, turning them into de-facto ID papers when, as mentioned, they were supposed to be just a certificate that you were qualified to drive on public highways.
Of course, there is also the argument that if people without legal U.S. immigration status can’t get driver’s licenses, there are more likely to be more bad and/or uninsured drivers running around, which will endanger the rest of the public.
Following what others have said, the phrase you want to look for is in Digital Stimulus’s post: “unfunded mandate.” Add that to your search to narrow your results to relevant articles and sites. Basically, it’s the Feds saying to the States, Here are a whole lot of new rules and procedures you need to follow, but we’re not going to give you a penny to help implement them.
If it makes you feel any better, my own Canadian-born grandmother wasn’t able to renew her New Jersey driver’s license after REAL ID passed. It may have had to do with her immigration status (though she lived in the U.S. from 1930 until her death a couple of years ago, so far I have not been able to determine whether she was here legally - trust me, it’s a LOOOOOONG story). But part of the issue was that her name on her birth certificate didn’t match the name she used as an adult. People used to be able to change their names *de facto * much less formally than they can now, but it created some bureaucratic nightmares for her.
Luckily for her, by then she was in no shape to drive, and my aunt had power of attorney for her to deal with other legal/financial issues. But trust me, if you saw her on the street or spoke with her, you’d have no way of knowing she wasn’t born in the U.S.
I’m not clear on whether this is an argument for REAL ID or against it.
It’s not an argument for or against. It’s just pointing out that REAL ID will also create difficulties for non-Hispanic people who look and sound exactly like native-born U.S. citizens. Some of those were among the people for whom REAL ID was meant to create difficulties, but some native-born U.S. citizens with discrepancies in their identity documents, or missing identity documents, will run into trouble, too.
Right now my office has a client who became a U.S. citizen several decades ago when his parents naturalized, by operation of law (he was under 18 at the time). He lied about his age to join the military and serve in Korea. Now he can’t renew his driver’s license, because his birthdates don’t match in various databases (and on various documents).
Thanks everyone.
Be very careful, it is ILLEGAL for illegal immigrants to vote. In a state like California where all you need is a driver’s license to register, many illegal immigrants DO vote.
As a sidenote, I lost my driver’s licence once so I carried around my passport as a legal ID. A store refused to accept it as a photo ID because it wasn’t a drivers license.
My understanding is that the REAL ID is not a mandate; states are free to ignore it. However, state IDs that do not pass muster with REAL ID requirements cannot be used for official Federal purposes.
That IS the usual form of a Federal unfunded mandate in this day and age… “oh, it’s voluntary… but it’ll suck to be you if you don’t do it”
Cite?