In this great country, the freedom to travel is a right – but does that right extend even to illegal immigrants who, by federal law, aren’t supposed to be here at all? Even with President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, 19 states and the District of Columbia still hand out driver’s licenses to those who shouldn’t even be in the US – some of whom go on to commit violent crimes. That includes, ironically, vehicular manslaughter.
Illegal Immigrants ‘Legally' Behind the Wheel
On August 12, a truck driver – who was in the country illegally yet was still issued a driver’s license – made a U-turn (also illegally) and crashed into another vehicle, killing all 3 occupants. The Florida Highway Patrol said the driver of the commercial semi-truck recklessly and “without regard for the safety of others,” attempted to make a U-turn in an unauthorized location. The driver, Harjinder Singh, entered the US illegally at the Mexico border in 2018. Even more shocking, the state of California issued him a commercial driver’s license.
In a statement from the office of Homeland Security, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote: “This state of governance is asinine. How many more innocent people must die before Gavin Newsom stops playing games with the safety of the American public? We pray for the victims and their families."
The Golden State’s governor tried to blame the Trump administration, posting on social media: "The federal government (YOU) already confirmed that this guy meets federal and state immigration requirements – YOU issued him a work permit."
However, McLaughlin disputed that claim, saying Singh’s work authorization was rejected under the Trump administration on September 14, 2020. “It was later approved under the Biden Administration [on] June 9, 2021,” she posted on X. “The state of California issues Commercial Driver’s Licenses. There is no national CDL.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t the only incident of illegal immigrants taking the lives of Americans while behind the wheel. Ruinan Zhao, a student at the University of California, Riverside, conducted a study using county-level crash data from the Fatality and Injury Reporting System Tool and leveraged the quasi-randomness of the timing of driver’s license reforms adoption across states to identify the causal effect of driver’s license reforms.” The study was published in the Social Science Research Network:
“My findings show that granting undocumented immigrants driver's licenses increases overall fatal crashes by nearly 5%, equivalent to 0.46 more fatal crashes in a county per year. The effect is stronger in states with a higher population of undocumented immigrants. By investigating the mechanism through which the policy impact is likely to occur, I show that nearly 60% of the increase is attributed to risk driving, implying that undocumented immigrants may be more likely to engage in risky driving behavior once they obtain driver's licenses. Several robustness checks and placebo tests support my main findings.”
“Every crime committed by an illegal alien is 100% preventable — [such people should] have never been in our country to begin with,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “[It] underscores how dangerous sanctuary jurisdictions are and how critical it is to deport criminal illegal aliens from the country. President Trump is committed to fulfilling the mandate he was elected on: deporting criminal illegal aliens and making America safe again.”
Others, though, argue that giving illegal immigrants driver’s licenses has many benefits. Those wishing to obtain the document will have to take written tests and may even be required to pass training, which teaches them better driving skills and knowledge of state laws. It supposedly reduces the number of hit-and-run accidents because illegals with a valid license are unafraid of getting into trouble for not having one. Some states, such as New York, shield license data from federal immigration authorities, reducing the risks of deportation. And then there’s the money factor, always a great incentive for politicians. In the first six months that California allowed aliens to get licenses, “application fees alone for 443,000 undocumented immigrants generated more than $13 million,” Clinic Legal reported.
“Dangerous behavior by illegal immigrants could put Americans at risk of death or serious bodily injury and should therefore affect the allocation of immigration enforcement resources,” the CATO Institute explained in a 2021 article. Furthermore, “[t]he danger posed by illegal immigrant drunk drivers is a frequent justification for increases in interior immigration enforcement. Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Thomas Homan went so far as to label driving under the influence (DUI) and driving while intoxicated (DWI) offenses committed by illegal immigrants as a ‘public safety threat.’ Indeed, law enforcement officials and immigration authorities alike continue to claim that illegal immigrants are significant DUI and DWI offenders.”
However, CATO also reported: “Nationwide, we find no statistical relationship between higher illegal immigrant population shares and drunk driving deaths.” And it must be noted that even if granting driver’s licenses to illegals raises any given county’s fatal accident rate by 5%, as Zhao’s study shows, that still means 95% of the new total – and 100% of the old total – weren’t caused by licensed illegal immigrants.
A Little History of Driver’s Licenses
As Homeland spokesperson McLaughlin said, “There is no national CDL.” Driver’s licenses are issued and required by the individual states, not the federal government – and it’s up to each state to determine the requirements for qualification. The first states to require licenses were Massachusetts and Missouri in 1903. California started requiring would-be drivers to pass exams in 1927. By 1930, only 24 states made it mandatory to have the documents to drive, and 15 had exams. It still took decades for all states to require licenses to drive, and South Dakota became the final state in 1959.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that undocumented drivers started being prohibited from getting a driver’s license. Ironically, considering how blue the Golden State is now, it was California that, in 1993, passed the nation’s first law requiring drivers to provide proof of their lawful status, according to Albany Law School Government Law Center. Pete Wilson, a Republican, was governor at the time. This was reversed in 2015 under Democratic Governor Jerry Brown.
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