Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON, May 11 2005 (IPS) — New U.S. driver’s license rules attached to a ”must-pass” military spending bill will undermine individual privacy and public safety and lead to increased discrimination against immigrants and asylum-seekers, according to the new measure’s critics.

Last-minute attempts by activists to halt introduction of a standardised electronic identity card failed Tuesday when the U.S. Senate voted 100-0 to impose a sweeping set of identification requirements. The ”Real ID Act” now awaits President George W. Bush’s signature, which is expected this month.

The House of Representatives last week had passed the measure as part of an 82-billion-dollar emergency supplemental spending bill for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The measure also provides funds for counter-terrorism operations and Asian tsunami relief.

The law’s backers, including the Bush administration, have said it will make the country’s borders safer by stopping illegal immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses. The hijackers who attacked U.S. targets on Sep. 11, 2001, carried valid driver’s licenses, they added.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, a Republican representative from the state of Wisconsin who sponsored the bill, said the Real ID Act requires states to verify four documents before issuing a driver’s license.

”Giving state driver’s licenses to anyone, regardless of whether they are here legally or illegally, is an open invitation for terrorists and criminals to exploit,” Sensenbrenner said.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), and other groups countered that the bill represents a crackdown on immigration and rolls back asylum laws.

”The Real ID Act won’t make America any safer,” said Wade Henderson, the LCCR executive director. It ”will open the door to widespread discrimination, create bureaucratic nightmares, and undermine public safety by increasing the number of unlicensed drivers on our roads.”

”The asylum provisions will make it harder for people fleeing persecution to prove their claims, without doing anything to make us safer. Indeed, suspected terrorists can already be barred from asylum, so there is little reason to make it harder on everyone else,” Henderson added.

The act would give states until May 2008 to make changes requiring applicants for a driver’s license to prove they are in the country legally. Those able to do so would be issued with licenses accepted as a form of federal identification for purposes including travelling by rail or air and opening a bank account.

States could issue second-tier licenses clearly marked as not valid for federal identification purposes and good for up to one year.

After the Real ID Act’s sponsors attached it to the military spending bill, final passage was all but guaranteed. That did not stop a determined coalition of civil liberties, immigration, and privacy activists from raising the alarm.

Groups that sought to mobilise members and the public against the measure ran the gamut from LCCR and the ACLU to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Amnesty International and the Hispanic National Council of La Raza, to online activists concerned about privacy and technology.

Among the latter groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation created a ”Stop The Real ID Act” campaign last week, echoing the ACLU’s view that bill would create ”a system ripe for identity theft.”

The new system would involve setting up a federal database containing personal information collected by the 50 U.S. states, which issue driver’s licenses. The new licenses also would have to be machine-readable and might include radio-frequency chips that could be monitored electronically.

State officials also had opposed the act.

The heads of the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures, American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators and Council of State Governments opposed the act in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, and Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada.

”While governors, state legislatures, other state elected officials and motor vehicle administrators share your concern for increasing security and integrity of the driver’s license and state identification processes, we firmly believe that the driver’s license and ID card provisions of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 offer the best course for meeting those goals,” the letter said.

Standards set in last year’s legislation would have proven less discriminatory, and less administratively and financially onerous, than those laid out in the Real ID Act, which supersedes the older law, state officials said.

The new bill allows the Homeland Security secretary to provide grants to states to help defray costs but it includes no money for them. Critics said this amounts to a massive unfunded mandate on states to check documents and set up new technologies to handle millions of driver’s license applications.

Eleven states allow immigrants to obtain licenses regardless of their legal residency status, saying this aids public safety by ensuring that drivers have passed tests and are insured.

Some state officials and civil libertarians are weighing challenging the new law in court.