February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Conaghan was also sounding the kind of rallying cry that became familiar in the late 1980s and the early days of the Irish Immigration Reform Movement. It went something along the lines of “we built the place and now they won’t let us in.”
Whether an exclusively Irish immigration-reform campaign takes flight in post-9/11 America remains in some doubt. But the undocumented Irish are still here, and their plight is being highlighted in various states and in a number of ways, not least a lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court.
That suit, filed last summer by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, included a plaintiff who is an undocumented Irish father of an American-born child. The father, whose identity is being kept anonymous with the court’s consent, needs a license to drive his child, who suffers from seizures, for emergency medical treatment.
A State Supreme Court judge last week issued a temporary order preventing the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles from refusing to issue licenses if an immigrant cannot produce a valid social security number.
Over the years, undocumented immigrants have been able to obtain driving permits in New York and other states through a variety of means, one being the provision of social security numbers that are borrowed from others who are not living in the U.S., or numbers that are simply made up.
But over the last year, the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has been sending out renewal letters to license holders where there is a discrepancy between social security numbers provided by individuals, and the records held by the Social Security Administration in Washington, D.C.
The letter, copies of which have been received by a number of undocumented Irish, informs the recipient that New York State’s DMV now requires verification of an individual’s social security number for all learner’s permits, driver’s licenses and identification documents issued by the department.
A federal tax identification number, which is evidence that the license holder pays taxes, is not deemed sufficient for a license renewal.
The DMV letter carries a clear warning: “Please be advised that if you do not contact us within 15 days from the date of this letter, we will have to take additional action, including the possible suspension of your learner permit, driver license or identification document.”
Irish immigration advocates say that that DMV should have no role in immigration law enforcement and that undocumented immigrants are being forced to quit the U.S. before they have a chance to secure legalization as a result of hoped for reform legislation coming from Washington.
For now, the New York court’s decision would appear to put a stay on license denial, at least until a Scheduled April 7 court hearing during which PRLDEF will seek a preliminary injunction preventing denial to the Irish father, the other plaintiffs in the suit and, beyond these individuals, many thousands of undocumented immigrants in New York State who depend on driver’s licenses to make a living.
“This is important recognition from the court that the DMV should not be enforcing immigration law and that the policy of denying licenses is harming the immigrant community,” said Jackie Zimo of the New York Immigration Coalition. “But there are still a lot of questions and uncertainty.”
The uncertainty in New York and other states, such as Conaghan’s Pennsylvania, has been heightened by the recent passage in the House of Representatives of the Real ID Act of 2005. The act proposes uniform rules for the issuing of temporary driver’s licenses in all states.
It would limit such licenses to the period of a visa issued to a particular individual and would deny permits to the undocumented.
Critics have claimed that its provisions will force states to clamp down on the issuing of licenses regardless of debate in individual state capitals, or the overall immigration reform debate in Washington.
The New York court ruling, according to Zimo, was a “big step forward” in that it now gave time, in New York State at least, for a “reasonable and rational” debate on both immigration reform and the issuing of licenses.
Zimo said that, in the meantime, it appeared that “a strong group” opposed to the Real ID Act was taking shape in the U.S. Senate.
She said that the easy passage of the bill through the House of Representatives — it passed by 261 to 161 votes — had been a “wakeup call” to senators who wanted to see proper and constructive immigration reform at the federal level.