Chuck Ross
Daily Caller
March 28, 2014
The California Department of Motor Vehicles is setting up new facilities to process driver’s license applications for illegal immigrants alone.
Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill, AB 60, which will allow illegal immigrants to obtain the documents beginning Jan. 1, 2015.
The bill was signed along with a number of others laws seen as favorable to undocumented immigrants.
As part of the driver’s license application process, immigrants will have to acknowledge that they are undocumented. But AB 60 protects applicants from criminal prosecution.
The measure will provide an avenue for the state’s three to four million undocumented immigrants to obtain licenses, which advocates have said are necessary in order for the immigrants to get to and from work. The law is expected to allow up to 1.4 million undocumented immigrants to obtain licenses.
To accommodate that expected influx of new drivers, the state’s DMV is setting up five facilities throughout California. The facilities will be opened in the areas of San Jose, the South Central Coast, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego, DMV spokewoman Jessica Gonzalez told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“This is the stepping-stone to state level amnesty,” Jon Feere, legal policy analyst at the Center of Immigration Studies, told TheDCNF.
Feere noted that former governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003 after signing into law a bill similar to AB 60.
“California is the state that gave us Ronald Reagan. Now it gives us illegal alien lawyers with law licenses and illegal alien drivers with driver’s licenses,” Feere said.
Despite the push, a majority of U.S. and California voters oppose providing undocumented immigrants with driver’s licenses.
According to a Rasmussen poll taken in the wake of the passage of AB 60, 68 percent of likely American voters oppose their state giving undocumented immigrants driver’s licenses.