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Georgia senator: Ban driver's licenses for some immigrants
A state Senate panel this week narrowly passed a bill to create special Georgia driver’s licenses and ID cards clearly identifying immigrants without legal status, a move critics say would amount to a “scarlet letter” right out of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th century novel.
The “driver’s privilege cards” and “special identification cards” would be for immigrants who have received deportation deferrals and work permits through the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The state would use different colors and fonts to distinguish them from standard Georgia driver’s licenses and ID cards. And they would carry the label: “No lawful status.”
Further, the cards would be valid during the length of the immigrant’s deferred action status or five years, whichever comes sooner. Applicants would have to submit fingerprints to get one.
Originally, Senate Bill 6 — sponsored by Republican Sen. Joshua McKoon of Columbus — banned Georgia driver's licenses for DACA recipients. But that version never got a committee hearing last year. A similar measure died in the 2014 session. The Senate Public Safety Committee passed the revised version on a 3-2 vote Wednesday.
McKoon could not be reached for comment Thursday. But he cited road safety, "voter integrity" and security issues, when he introduced the original bill in 2014.
“There have been press reports in North Carolina that folks on deferred action have registered to vote – have attempted to vote,” he said. “We simply can’t have that in our state. We have to have elections that people can respect the integrity of.”
“You generally are not going to be granted admittance to a federal building without a driver’s license of some kind and that is a security measure,” he added. “And if you start talking about issuing these licenses to large populations that we know very little about — in terms of where is the person’s country of origin, what is their reason for being in the country — I think quite frankly we create some security challenges as well.”
Opponents of the measure call it dehumanizing.
“When you create a group of second-class people — in this case second-class Georgians — and treat them differently, then we are on a slippery slope here,” said Raymond Partolan of Norcross, a native of Philippines who has DACA and is the program coordinator at Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta. “And who knows what is going to happen next to immigrant communities here in Georgia.”
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