Grassroots Rally Team

Illegal Aliens Goal is a Set of Valid License Plates

Excellent article by David North who brings to light one of the top priorities for illegal aliens is the acquisition of a set of valid license plates. Once acquired and with good driving habits, an illegal alien can remain undetected for years.

Denying License Plates to Illegals, Too

While many states in recent years have made it harder for illegal aliens to get driver's licenses, too few states examine these documents when issuing license plates for cars. A survey of state motor vehicle agencies showed these practices:

*Only a few states, no more than four, issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, or provide inadequate screening systems.
*A much larger group, 19, hand out driver’s license relatively carefully, but do not demand the document when distributing the plates.
*The largest group of jurisdictions, 23 of them (including Washington, D.C.) deny driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, and require that everyone seeking to register a car must produce that document.
*There are also five states where the rules are not clear; in two of them the issuance of plates is done by county clerks, with the practices varying by county.

No_License_Plates_for_IllegalsDriver’s licenses are routinely used as ID documents in America; I certainly use mine that way scores of times in commercial settings for every time that I actually show it to a police officer.

But if we want to discourage illegal aliens from driving (and generally from living in the United States) we should think about the license plates on cars as well. A rumpled, street-wise friend of mine, once a Virginia criminal defense lawyer, and now in the municipal tax collection business, said to me once: “David, what the illegals really want, in addition to amnesty, is a set of valid license plates for their cars.”

“A missing or out-of-date license plate on a car is much more visible than a lapsed or non-existent driver’s license. The cop can see it from a distance without having to stop the car first,” he continued, “and the illegals aren’t dumb, they know that.”

A few weeks later, a colleague mentioned that the issuances of driver’s licenses and license plates, though usually done by the same state agency, were often on different tracks, and someone who could not get a driver’s card, could get license plates.

Bearing in mind these two threads of intelligence, I decided to explore the extent of the disconnect between the two issuance processes, state by state. It was a tedious bit of research but in the days before the Internet it would have taken much longer. Some states’ instructions on registering a car, or getting the plates, tell whether a driver’s license is needed, and some do not; but all have e-mail answering services, of varying degrees of quality, that you can attempt to use when the information is not immediately forthcoming on the Web...

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