Since this is a NYT report, the subtextual subtitle appears to be: "Working woman from Westchester County, immigrant workers hardest hit":

[At the meeting] Raymond P. Martinez, the state motor-vehicles commissioner, began his hour-and-a-half-long testimony by reminding the audience that 18 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 held valid driver's licenses.

"These license documents, issued in states where requirements were less stringent than those here in New York State, allowed the hijackers to board airplanes and execute their acts of terrorism against our nation," he said...

But in one of several sharp exchanges, Assemblyman Noah Nicholas Perry, a Democrat from Brooklyn, challenged the commissioner's references to the 9/11 terrorists, calling the assertion that they had been allowed to board planes because they had licenses "blatantly false," since the men also had valid passports. Other speakers, including Deborah Notkin, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, noted that since the hijackers had entered the country legally, they would have been able to obtain valid driver's licenses even under New York's restrictions.

I'm going to have to check on that, but one wonders why they went to Florida and Virginia. From Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA):

"On September 11, 2001 al Qaeda slipped into airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington, DC undetected. No less than 7 of these terrorists used authentic Virginia identification cards obtained from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.

"The terrorists used Virginia identification cards for a reason. Although not a single one of these terrorists was actually a lawful resident of Virginia, they knew the weaknesses of Virginia's identification process; and they exploited those weaknesses in their plot to kill thousand of Americans...

While Virginia moved swiftly to close the loopholes that made this possible, California has moved to widen them. Recently, the GAO sent three undercover agents into separate offices of the California DMV--each with false identification, purportedly from Texas, which they had manufactured themselves on a desktop computer using PhotoShop. According to the GAO, the documents should have been easily identified as forgeries. To make it especially easy for the California DMV to stop the fraud, each of the three undercover agents used the same fake name. Yet California cheerfully issued California driver's licenses to all three of them--all based on the same poor quality forged documents, and all using exactly the same name...

For more on the GAO's investigation, see "Fake Documents, Real Drivers Licenses".

And:

As a result of such laxity in licensing, all of the 9/11 hijackers had driver's licenses or state non-driver's identification cards, which they were able to use when renting housing, opening bank accounts, and boarding planes. For example, Hijacker Hanni Hanjour and Khalid Al-Midhar obtained Virginia licenses by hiring an illegal alien to co-sign their residency forms and listing his address as theirs. The day after they got their licenses, they sponsored two other hijackers, Salem Al-Hamzi and Majed Moqed, to get licenses, too...

Why, there was even an NPR report on it (audio at the link):

Robert Siegel reports on the Department of Motor Vehicles in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where a liberal policy for obtaining a driver's license or state identification card has led to years of fraud and corruption. It took the events of Sept. 11 to finally put an end to the policy, when the FBI learned that at least seven of the hijackers had gotten Virginia I.D. cards. Law enforcement officials have concluded that for the past several years, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants were able to get legal driver's licenses or identification cards from Virginia. Applicants didn't need the standard proofs of identity or residency -- such as social security cards or utility bills. Forms that were much easier to fake were accepted. And unscrupulous lawyers and notaries established a thriving illicit market for processing undocumented aliens for hefty fees.

And, as stated in the 9/11 report, 9/11 would not have happened if we had followed our visa rules.

Wouldn't proper coverage of this matter have reported on those last excerpts rather than just quoting the AILA's statements without comment?

Continuing with the NYT report:

[The AILA rep tugged at our heart strings with tales about a] working mother in Westchester County, [who] is frantic because her devoted Uruguayan babysitter, who has lived in New York since she was 12, will lose her license for lack of a Social Security number or valid visa; an elderly woman is going to lose the immigrant home health care aide who drives her to her doctor... [Assemblyman Barry Grodenchik] said he had met with Korean greengrocers and florists whose businesses are heavily dependent on immigrant truck drivers now losing their licenses.

Gosh, you think they could hire legal workers instead? Or, is that thinking too "out of the box" for the AILA and the NYT? And, once again, these people aren't "immigrants," they're illegal aliens. Further on in the report, Nina Bernstein euphemizes yet again, using "newcomers" when "illegal aliens" is the actual term.

Perhaps one of these days the NYT will look into this issue from a perspective based on laws, immigration policies, and the need for security, but I think a more balanced report is going to have to come from another paper.

Previous coverage of NYT immigration coverage starts here, and the previous report has pre-hearing coverage from the NY Post.

UPDATE: The NY Daily News' report is entitled "9/11 kin back
immig ID plan". Based on the last paragraph, I'm going to tentatively assume their use of "undocumented immigrants" and "immigrants" instead of "illegal aliens" is just ignorance and not part of an attempt to hide the truth:

Families of Sept. 11th victims backed yesterday a controversial state plan to revoke driver's licenses from hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who got them using fake Social Security numbers...

Undocumented immigrants and their advocates say they needed driver's licenses to get jobs, and had little choice but to provide phony Social Security numbers to get them.