It's endorsement week at the Mercury. That means, for the next few days, we'll be releasing endorsements in one or more selected races here on Blogtown—building up to our full set of election picks, due out this Wednesday.
Today, we reveal our decision in the race for Measure 88, which would uphold a state law offering drivers' cards to Oregonians who either can't or won't supply documents proving their status as legal residents of the United States.
Which race will we feature tomorrow? Come back to find out. And don't forget to pick up the paper this Wednesday—that's tomorrow!—for our entire roster.
- denis c. theriault
- An educational leaflet handed out at the Oregon State Fair.
If you vote no on Measure 88, which would allow Oregon to assign driver’s cards to people who can’t (or just won’t) produce documents proving their legal residency in the United States, that’s exactly what you’ll be doing.
You’ll be just as horrible as groups like Protect Oregon Drivers Licenses and Oregonians for Immigration Reform, who have been spreading manure piles of misinformation about what’s actually at stake—including some unconscionable references to September 11.
Measure 88 won’t give driver’s licenses to “illegal aliens,” opening the door to waves of terrorism and voter fraud. In fact, it won’t be giving licenses to anybody. The card called for in the measure won’t be considered legal identification. It’ll just be a way to prove someone passed state driving examinations and qualifies for affordable car insurance.
(Hell, you don’t have to be an immigrant to get one. Maybe you can’t find your birth certificate and can’t afford to order one. Maybe you’re a privacy advocate who thinks it’s stupid that driving privileges are tied up with government ID cards. Either way, this is for you, too.)
How do we know the sky won’t fall? For one thing, it’s because we’re rational. But in case you need a bit more convincing, consider this: Ten other states, and Washington, DC, already offer something similar, including nearly every state surrounding Oregon (sorry, Idaho!). Disorder and chaos have yet to descend. In fact, crash rates in New Mexico, which passed its law in 2003, have dropped. And in Utah? Fewer people have resorted to driving without insurance.
And then consider something else: Before 2008, according to backers like the ACLU and immigration rights group CAUSA, Oregon had no issue with handing out actual driver’s licenses—not mere driver’s cards—to people who couldn’t verify their immigration status. You probably had no idea anything had changed.
But some Oregonians have noticed—and that’s why this shouldn’t be seen as another front in America’s immigration wars. Families forced into the shadows—many of them with mixed immigration status, with a parent who’s undocumented and children who are not—would like to be able to drive legally and obtain insurance.
Instead, they’re confronting agonizing choices no one should have to face.
Right now, when a child in one of those families falls ill, parents who’d want to get that child to a doctor must weigh the risk of being pulled over, and possibly winding up flagged for deportation. Or maybe they’ll pass up a job. Or a chance to send their children to a better school.
Those questions would all be eased with a driver’s card—which wouldn’t and couldn’t be allowed as a pretext for Oregon cops to question someone’s immigration status, officials say.
This was all supposed to have been settled a little more than a year ago.
In bipartisan fashion—backed by an unusual coalition of interests including immigrant rights activists and powerful business lobbyists—the Oregon Legislature sent this same program over to Governor John Kitzhaber. And Kitzhaber, bless him, signed that bill, SB 833, even though it might catch him some flak on the campaign trail.
So what happened? Bigots decided to raise thousands of signatures from a minority of Oregonians and put SB 833 on the ballot, where they’d be free to spew some scare tactics and undo something sensible and humane.
The latest polls show they’re winning. Don’t let them. We’re better than that.
