Driving while immigrant: Driver's license policy and immigration enforcement

Abstract

While much of the literature on immigration enforcement is focused on the border and the worksite, city streets have increasingly become an important site for immigration enforcement, and the policing of immigrants' mobility has expanded a great deal. Over the last decade, driving (or being driven) has become an increasingly risky activity with a higher probability of deportation for unlawfully present immigrants. Traffic enforcement has come to play a more prominent role in immigration enforcement throughout the interior of the USA, particularly with the expansion of the Secure Communities program and restrictions on immigrant access to driver's licenses. While unauthorized immigrants could already be deported for an immigration violation, the fact that they can be arrested and convicted of driving without a license exposes them to law enforcement in a way that they had not been previously. This shift can potentially result in a deterioration of community policing, reallocation of resources from criminal investigations to immigration enforcement, and greater potential for civil rights violations. In this chapter, I track the development of state driver's license laws and the relationship between traffic enforcement and immigration enforcement. I conclude that, while driver's license policies and state/local police policies advanced along parallel paths throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, national security concerns and anti-immigrant sentiment following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 allowed both policies to develop quickly and expansively. The convergence of these two separate but related policies has resulted in traffic violations constituting a key element of immigration enforcement in the interior of the USA.