Some of these folks may be wanted criminals in their home countries. And some others - 383, according to the audit - registered to vote. Fourteen actually voted.
All of this gives Utah officials heartburn. But there's more.
In the same week that the audit came out, Congress passed a bill to prevent states from issuing driver licenses to undocumented people. The reason is security. The feds don't want illegals to use state driver licenses as identification to travel on airplanes, for example.
The feds have a point, even though the 9-11 hijackers were mostly Saudis, and none were from Mexico or Brazil or El Salvador or Vietnam or even Sudan, for that matter.
Nevertheless, when Utah began issuing driver licenses to undocumented people in the 1990s, it was a different world. There was no war on terror and most people had never heard of al-Qaida.
But one thing has not changed. It still makes sense for the state to encourage undocumented immigrants to get driver licenses. The reason is that people with licenses at least have to have enough familiarity with standard highway signs and the rules of the road to pass the driver tests. They should be safer drivers.
They also are able to buy car insurance, which benefits not only them but all other drivers as well.
The simple answer to this dilemma may be to separate driver licenses from official identification, at least for people who cannot prove U.S. citizenship. That is what state Sen. Curtis Bramble has proposed.
His Senate Bill 227 would issue something called a driving privilege card to someone who does not use a Social Security number to obtain the card. It would only allow a person to drive, would be different from a driver license in appearance and format, and would explicitly state that it is not a valid form of identification. Further, it would prohibit government officers from accepting the driving privilege card as ID.
Behind this controversy stands the elephant in the closet, the failed immigration policy of the United States, which Utah is powerless to solve. For that, we believe that President Bush is on the right track when he suggests a realistic guest worker program that would allow immigrants, especially Mexicans, to work here legally. If it were carefully designed, it also would enhance security because it would give visiting workers an incentive to be documented.
