"Immigrants Face Loss of Licenses in ID Crackdown"

Oh no. Immigrants are being subjected to some form of crackdown? Let's read this NYT article:

Legislatures across the country have been wrestling publicly with a hot-button issue: whether to make it harder or easier for illegal immigrants to be licensed as drivers. The struggle to reconcile public security, road safety and the reality of millions of illegal immigrant workers has led to fierce disagreement and widely different laws - even as the 9/11 commission has urged the adoption of national standards.

As with other papers, the headline isn't telling the truth: these aren't "immigrants," they're illegal aliens. And, there are more things that need to be reconciled than those three listed above. Such as, should we really be giving legal driver's licenses to illegal aliens?

...officials at the [New York] State Department of Motor Vehicles have begun a crackdown on license fraud that will take away the driver's licenses of as many as 200,000 immigrants who cannot prove that they are here legally... Fear and protest spread in places like Westchester County and Staten Island as the letters reached longtime immigrant drivers... the outcry grew as immigrant advocates learned of cases in which bewildered immigrants who responded in person to motor vehicle offices had their licenses confiscated on the spot for lack of a Social Security number.

Today the protests, and explanations by the crackdown's authors, will be presented in Manhattan at the first public hearing on the policy...

Shorter version: the authors of this crackdown certainly owe all of us an explanation for spreading fear in the immigrant community.

State officials say 250,000 licenses are in line to be suspended... "The public is going to be shocked when they find out how many people's Social Security numbers were used by other people unbeknownst to them," [Raymond P. Martinez, the state motor vehicles commissioner] said, putting the figure at more than 100,000, including one number that was used by 57 people...

..."Nobody has considered the bureaucratic nightmare that they're creating," said Margaret Stock, an associate professor of national security law at the United States Military Academy at West Point...

[...more complaints from Stock deleted...]

[...interviews with two illegal aliens deleted...]

Nowhere in the article does it state the simple, fundamental fact that perhaps we shouldn't be giving legal licenses to illegal aliens. After all, if we presumably want to disencentivize illegal immigration, not giving driver's licenses to illegal aliens is one good place to start.

If you were trying to evaluate the tone and content of this article for bias, here's a simple test: how different is this article from one that would have been written by one of those "immigrant advocacy" groups mentioned above? If you saw this article printed in a handout from one of those groups, wouldn't you think it had been written by someone from that group?

While the article contains two interviews with illegal aliens, it does not contain an interview with someone whose social security number was used by an illegal alien. Given the numbers above, someone like that shouldn't be too hard to find.

And, while we're treated to a long stretch of Margaret Stock's opinions, we don't hear from anyone who takes a contrary view. Perhaps Nina Bernstein could have interviewed one of the Florida sheriffs who opposed Jeb Bush's attempt to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens:

"It's incomprehensible to me that you would legitimize through the issuance of a driver's license someone who is here illegally," said Marion County Sheriff Ed Dean, who heads the law-enforcement arm of the task force. "I'm sure the governor has his reasons. From strictly a law-enforcement viewpoint, I would have to respectfully disagree..."

"This law is very poorly crafted and flawed from a domestic security standpoint. I strongly oppose it and cannot support the conceptual intent, either," [Collier County Sheriff Don Hunter] wrote in an e-mail.

Or, perhaps she could have interviewed the Commisioner of Minnesota's Department of Public Safety:

...advocates argue that they want to give drivers licenses to illegal immigrants so they will be safer drivers. This argument is completely without merit and is a transparent attempt to turn the illegal immigrant problem into a public safety issue. There is no evidence that if illegal immigrants received drivers licenses, they would enroll in driver education programs, obtain insurance, and refrain from fleeing the scene of an accident. Common sense dictates that an individual on the run from the law would not wait around at an accident site for the police to arrive... The Department of Public Safety will not facilitate illegal immigration...

(That quote is also in this article about DLs for IAs.)

Note also that this article was written by Nina Bernstein, who was featured here just a few days ago as the author of the PIIPP ("pro-illegal immigration puff piece") entitled "From Immigrants, Stories Of Scrutiny, and Struggle". In that article she used the following phrase:

longtime immigrant workers who cannot prove that they are working legally

In this article, she uses the following:

200,000 immigrants who cannot prove that they are here legally

Maybe she's got a macro or something.

Please send a polite email to the NYT's Public Editor and suggest they do a better job with their immigration coverage: public@nytimes.com

1/11/05 UPDATE: The NYT article includes a quote from Margaret Stock. She's described as "an associate professor of national security law at the United States Military Academy at West Point, who is writing a paper on the driver's license issue... who is also a lieutenant colonel in the military police of the Army Reserves".

On April 1, 2004 she testified before congress, "on behalf of the American Immigration Lawyers Association".

Along with her other qualifications, one would think the AILA link should have been mentioned in the NYT report.

Which raises the question: are other quote sources for the NYT's immigration stories who have undisclosed affiliations with the AILA, NIF, ACLU, PFAW, MALDEF, NCLR, etc. etc. etc.?