Arnold vetoes driver's licenses for illegal aliens bill

As expected: "Schwarzenegger vetoes driver's licenses for illegal immigrants." The text of his nice letter vetoing the bill is here.

Also as expected, State Senator Gil "One Bill Gil" Cedillo, perennial sponsor of these bills, says he will keep on trying.

Although there's been much coverage of Cedillo here, the most telling bit is his barely-noticed rationale for giving DLs to IAs: "they were here first." I attempted to parse that phrase here. That was, of course, soon replaced by him constantly repeating "it's for public safety, it's for public safety."

See also the attempts by some of his putatively American co-workers to seek help with this bill from the Mexican senate.

As for the report linked to above, note that this is written by Jim Wasserman of the AP. There seem to be two forms of this report: a short version and a long version. The long version is linked to above and here. The short version is here.

From the long version, we learn two surprising facts I had not heard of before.

1. California's "neighbors" include "Utah, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii." I guess I'm just old-fashioned, thinking as I do that "neighbor" implies contiguousness or not being separated by thousands of miles of water. (Perhaps the AP reporter is thinking forward to that bridge they're building or something.)

2. "Lawmakers passed the ban [on DLs for IAs] in 1993 as anti-immigrant sentiment swept the state, culminating in 1994's passage of Proposition 187, which aimed to deny public services to illegal immigrants."

#1 I don't mind so much. However, #2 is inaccurate and internally inconsistent. Send your emails to: info@ap.org

Immigration_dls · Wed, 09/22/2004 - 19:33 · · Importance: 1