Immigrants May Be Able to Stay, But Life Won’t Get Easier For Them in Arizona

President Obama may have
announced what’s essentially a temporary amnesty (yes, it

is amnesty, and that’s OK) for many illegal immigrants
in the United States, but while that will make their lives easier
with regard to federal authorities, state officials still have
plenty of ways of making people’s lives difficult. For one,
Governor-Elect Doug Ducey, of Arizona, says “this unilateral executive
action without working with Congress is the wrong approach.” His
comments Governor Jan Brewer’s
condemnation of “brazen, unilateral action” (both are
Republicans). And that’s a
strong indication that Ducey will continue Brewer’s policy of
denying illegal immigrants the pieces of state-issued ID that we
need to do so any things in the modern security state.

In 2012, Brewer responded to the Obama administration’s deferred
action plan on immigrants who arrived illegally as children, by
issuing an executive
order to bar them access to any “taxpayer-funded public
benefits and state identification, including a driver’s license.”
The federal government has
made clear that public schools are not among the
“taxpayer-funded public benefits” that can be put off-limits to
immigrants. But given the all-purpose show-your-papers role that
driver’s licenses and other state ID have taken on, that’s hassle
enough.

It’s also petty.

Nativists often argue that illegal immigrants are a
net economic drain on the United States, even though they pay

billions in taxes for federal benefits, including Social
Security, they don’t receive. Illegal immigrants may in fact
receive more in state
and local benefits than they pay in taxes, according to CBO
reckoning. But the biggest cost is education, from which, once
again, they can’t be excluded. By contrast, driver’s licenses and
state identification cards are
paid for by fees.

The only reason to deny driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants
subject to amnesty is to make their lives more difficult. And life
becomes more difficult because it’s a
growing challenge, especially post-9/11, for anybody to go through
life without a piece of plastic issued by the goverment (or at
least purporting to be) attesting that they are who they say they
are. A
2004 report from the National Law Center on the problems faced
by the homeless noted:

Even before the events of September 11, 2001, people needed
identification to drive, obtain legal employment, open a bank
account, board an airplane, enter certain government buildings, and
access many social services. After September 11, 2001, the fear of
terrorism has added a new sense of urgency to the government’s
effort to identify those who operate within its borders.

The end result of such petty bureaucratic end runs is that many
immigrants may get a pass from the federal goverment, but state
officials can still confine them to a sort of legal purgatory.