Is That The Sound of The Dam Cracking?

(CBS) NEW YORK – They were celebrating outside the governor’s office Friday as Eliot Spitzer handed a landmark victory to a half-million illegal immigrants.

The state will no longer require proof of citizenship for driver’s licenses.
…

Under the new policy, the Department of Motor Vehicles will accept foreign passports and birth certificates from immigrants as proof of identification. They will no longer need to provide a Social Security card.

-Governors Press Release

Yes you heard that right, you don’t have to be here legally, just have a current passport from somewhere and a foreign birth certificate. Actually not even, don’t worry if the coyote took your birth certificate just call up the IRS and get a ITIN Card sent to you, or if your on parole your parole papers will do just fine in place of birth certificate.

Not counting new sign up’s this will re-license approximately 250,000 drivers with known unverifiable SS#’s.

I think the citizens of other states if they so choose should pressure there own state governments to respond by no longer recognizing NY State drivers licenses as valid on their roads until NYS changes the policy to clearly show the unverified legal status on the ID, which is not the current policy. If NY would make that change it would at least give other states and enforcement officials the ability to enact and apply policies that did not regard these ID’s as valid.

If not than each state has effectively sanctioned these illegals to drive on their roads, and use their airports for that matter. Up until today no matter how lax some facilities may have been in authenticating documentation all states had required a legal status check of some form in obtaining a state issued drivers license.

Will my driver license document look different than those issued to other NYS residents?

No, your driver license document will look the same as other NYS driver license documents.

While the press release mentions some details about enhanced security checks to prevent multiple id ’s being issued to the same person they make no mention of any attempt to prevent illegals from checking the citizen box on the  voter registration form and entering their valid drivers license number, as a Social Security number is not required.   No mention if the drivers licenses will be flagged in the database as legal status unknown so that they can be cross checked with voter registration attempts.

If such flags exist then ICE should immediately request access to the database, though I doubt such flags exist specifically in order to prevent making this such an easy data mining target for immigration enforcement. I’ve not bothered to goto how this policy change violates the yet to be enforced REAL ID Act because frankly a good number of states have, I believe correctly, passed state laws refusing to enforce or abide by it – though related it’s another topic for another day.

I’m very interested in what comments the Republican and Democrat candidates will be making about this, particularly the reaction from former mayor Giuliani about the actions of Democrat Governor Spitzer in his home state.

As a side note see if you can find what’s never mentioned in the CBS story.