Only three states, New Mexico, Utah and Washington, give driving rights to residents regardless of their immigration status. (iStock photo)

New Mexico, Washington and Utah are currently the only states that allow undocumented immigrants to drive. But in all three states, immigrants face threats to their right to drive as agencies step up residency proof requirements or politicians argue for eliminating illegal immigrants’ driving privileges altogether.

Backlash against driving rights for illegal immigrants is nothing new: After 9/11, a few groups lobbied hard at the state level to change laws that allowed undocumented immigrants to receive licenses, claiming they could be used by terrorists to assume false identities.

Anti-terrorist fervor has since died down, but the push to clamp down on illegal immigration has not, and measures to take away driving rights for the undocumented have broad support. In New Mexico, for instance, Governor-elect Susana Martinez, a tough-on-immigration Republican, said last week that she has the public’s backing to change laws that allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

“Around 80 percent of people in New Mexico don’t want the people who are here illegally to have a driver’s license,” Martinez said on Univision Nov. 7. “They want to ensure that those who get licenses are from the United States.”

Advocates of licenses for illegal immigrants say they put more money in states’ coffers through vehicle registration and licensing fees. They also increase the number of licensed drivers, who must undergo tests and are required to buy insurance. This increases overall public safety, according to proponents, because licensed drivers are, overall, less likely to be involved in serious car crashes. One-fifth of fatal car crashes involve at least one unlicensed driver, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

“There is this hysteria at the national level that somehow people were able to use these documents to do harmful things, when really these people are just using the documents to drive, buy insurance and register their vehicles,” said Marcela Diaz of Somos Un Pueblo Unido, an immigrant rights group in New Mexico that opposes changes to driver’s license laws. “We live in a state with very little public transportation. People drive because there really is no alternative.”

In Utah, immigrants may face another threat to driving rights if conservative state lawmakers succeed at passing broad immigration enforcement legislation based on Arizona’s SB 1070.

The state established a driver’s privilege card in 2005 for people who lived in the state but could not provide Social Security numbers. Now, though, immigrant rights advocates argue the card’s benefits could be undermined by a bill proposed by state Rep. Stephen Sandstrom (R). The bill would require police officers to check immigration status on people they arrest and can reasonably suspect to be illegal immigrants. It would also allow immigration enforcement officials to access the databases for driver’s privilege cards.

If passed, Sandstrom’s bill would likely discourage many undocumented immigrants from getting driver’s privilege cards, according to immigration lawyers. The law would allow police and federal immigration agents to access the database for driving privilege cards, which legislators promised would not be shared with police when the cards were created in 2005. The databases include international birth certificates, but generally immigration attorneys can keep the card from being used as evidence in deportation hearings because civil rights laws forbid police in non-border states from asking immigration status for non-immigration-related crimes.

Opponents of the bill say it is unconstitutional, in part because it would allow access to the database. And the mere existence of a driver’s privilege cardwould provide reason to suspect a driver of being undocumented, since U.S. citizens living in Utah would have a Utah driver’s license, which can be used for official purposes other than driving.

“If his legislation gets to be implemented, you will effectively be getting rid of the driving-privilege card,” state Sen. Luz Robles (D), who opposes the law,told the Salt Lake Tribune.

Washington’s state Department of Licensing implemented new requirements Nov. 8 to try to keep Washington licenses out of the hands people who do not reside in the state after the Associated Press reported in August that more undocumented immigrants were seeking licenses in Washington, New Mexico and Utah after Arizona passed SB 1070. Washington allows people who do not have Social Security numbers to receive licenses if they meet other requirements and live in the state. Now applicants who cannot provide Social Security numbers are required to give a valid Washington address, proven by documentation such as a rental agreement. (It is illegal to rent to undocumented immigrants in some, but not all, jurisdictions.)

The idea is to eliminate instances of fraud, and to prevent undocumented immigrants from other parts of the country from traveling to Washington to get driver’s licenses even though they do not live there. In Maryland, which stopped giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants in 2009, authorities said fraud became a major problem when Maryland became the only state in the east that gave driver’s licenses to people without Social Security numbers. Many states banned illegal immigrants from receiving driving rights between 2001 and 2005, when Congress passed the Real ID Act mandating strict regulations for driver’s licenses accepted for official federal purposes. The act didn’t overhaul driver’s license laws — 17 states passed legislation to undercut the act — but it set the course for more states to end practices that gave illegal immigrants licenses.

The last major effort to expand driving rights, by then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D), ended in 2007 when Spitzer encountered heavy opposition to the proposal.

Maryland licenses were frequently obtained by out-of-state illegal immigrants who gave addresses to Maryland P.O. boxes or proved their residency using cell phone bills addressed to addresses where they didn’t reside. Some states, including Colorado, Arizona and Oklahoma, stopped acceptingMaryland driver’s licenses for people who moved to the state to obtain new licenses.

In response to these concerns, Maryland instituted a new law on June 1, 2009, requiring immigrants to prove they were in the country legally to receive a driver’s license. Undocumented immigrants who previously received licenses were allowed to apply for one-time driving permits that will expire in 2015.

Washington made a better choice by continuing to allow illegal immigrants to receive licenses, said Tyler Moran, policy director for National Immigration Law Center, which supports driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

“That’s not a bad policy if they’re going to preserve licenses for everybody,” she said. “They’re intended for state residents, and states have every right to ensure people are actually residing in the state they apply for a license in.”

Moran, who has tracked the issue for a few years, said she hopes lawmakers in New Mexico and Utah will be successful at stopping efforts to take away or discourage driving rights for undocumented immigrants.

“The New Mexico law has been around for quite some time now and has seen this type of attack repeatedly,” she said. “Policy-makers have continually stood up and said this is good public policy for New Mexico. I’m hoping the state policy-makers will do the same next year.”

She offers, “As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border.” 

Wiener checks out the flight paths of major airlines to see if what Palin says is true: that Russian aircraft fly over Alaska on their way to Washington. Not so much, it turns out.

I believe he’s right. The situation is that serious. Democrats and Republicans alike, in their words and actions, have indicated that the collapse of America’s financial markets may be imminent if Washington doesn’t step in and do something drastic. Such a collapse could send us into the next Great Depression. The last few days have been one of those moments in history like the stock-market crash of 1929 that children will learn about in school.

In an age before globalization, that depression was worldwide. Today, such a depression would have catastrophic effects in our interconnected world. Some Third World governments would literally collapse into chaos.

Who knows what will happen in America. How bad can this get? I think it’s telling that the presidential candidates have been largely bumped from the news cycle and that, while politicking is still happening, a little more than a month before one of the most critical and hotly contested elections in our nation’s history, even many Washington politicians have set aside the election to deal with the current crisis.

So what’s this crash landing going to look like? To survive this mess, I believe we have to pay down debt with increased taxes and reduced spending. And we’re going to have to dramatically change or perhaps even increase regulation to put an end to the practices that led us down this path. But there’s apparently another step that is going to precede those.

The crash landing starts with the $700 billion bailout plan being negotiated by the Bush Administration and congressional leaders. Regardless of my mixed feelings about bailing out banks, Congress appears poised to do this in the coming days. Under the plan, the federal government (you and me) will apparently be buying up mortgages that are dragging on the financial well-being of banks. I saw one analyst on television characterizing it as purging banks of toxic debt.

That’s an interesting analogy, because it accurately characterizes the situation: We, the American people, will be swallowing the banks’ toxic debt for them.

Raising taxes, cutting spending

But the debt will still exist, so if we’re going to head down this path, we have to come up with a way to pay for it. We can do that by printing more money or by raising taxes. Printing more money isn’t really an option. It would lead to extreme inflation, perhaps even hyperinflation, and would be disastrous.

So we’ll have to raise taxes. Get ready for it. This bailout plan isn’t really leaving the next president much choice in the matter, regardless of what the candidates say.

There’s more we’re going to have to do to get out of this mess. America’s debt is toxic at every level. We need to spend years purging it. Individuals need to reduce their credit card, mortgage and other debt. Local and state governments need to slow new construction projects and focus on paying back the bonds for existing and old construction projects. The federal government needs to pay for the bailout, balance its budget and begin paying down the rest of the federal debt, which is currently about $9.7 trillion.

To do that, we’re going to have to tighten our belts — individuals, local and state governments and the federal government. In addition to raising taxes, the next president is going to have to make painful cuts to the federal budget. Many local and state governments will also have to make cuts.

That’s going to make for some rough times. Unemployment will likely increase before it begins dropping again. The economy will stagnate. Times are going to get more difficult before they get better.

But it’s clear we can’t just spend our way out of this mess. We tried that earlier this year with a tax rebate that did little or nothing to stimulate the economy and was followed by the current crisis. Few Washington politicians, including the president and the two presidential candidates, are admitting that the bailout plan will necessitate a tax increase and budget cuts. But to work, that’s what I believe this plan is going to require.

Washington and Wall Street have led us to the brink

I’m admittedly not an economist. I’m no financial expert. But when I wrote about the economy back in March, I held back and intentionally didn’t reveal the extent of my concern because the so-called experts were saying the situation wasn’t grim. In fact, U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, one of the more intelligent members of Congress, told me on the day that column was published that there was some reason to be concerned, but that media hype was blowing the situation out of proportion. She said there would be an “economic slowdown,” but that it should be “short and shallow.”

The point is that most in Washington and on Wall Street didn’t see this coming. Now they’ve created a huge mess. Democrats may blame Republicans, and Republicans may blame Democrats, but the reality is that Washington, in a very bipartisan way, has failed to stop Wall Street from taking us down a path that threatens the stability and security of the United States. Our politicians and our corporations have led this nation to the brink.

Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and chairman of the Senate banking committee, admitted as much after a Thursday meeting at which he said those leaders were told by the top financial people in government “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system.”

We’re crashing. Can we figure out a way to land safely? Time will tell.