A bill allowing immigrants without legal status in Massachusetts to apply for their standard driver’s license became law Thursday after the State Senate overrode Gov. Charlie Baker’s veto of the measure.
The House of Representatives overrode the same veto a day earlier.
Baker had vetoed the bill out of concern that it might be used to give undocumented immigrants the ability to vote. Once the law is enacted, immigrants without status will have the opportunity to drive legally after they take a road test, vision test, and obtain an insurance policy.
Immigrants without legal status will be able to apply for, and obtain, standard state driver’s licenses beginning July 2023 if they show documents proving their identity, date of birth, and residency in Massachusetts, State House News Service said.
One of the reasons why the legislation does not go into effect until July 2023 is because the legislators wanted to give the Registry of Motor Vehicles time to train its employees, said State Sen. Brendan Crighton (D-Lynn). Crighton also said that the state legislators had been working on this legislation for several years with a wide range of stakeholders, including law-enforcement, public health, education, industries, businesses, and human service organizations.
Sixteen other states have already passed similar legislation, said Crighton, and in those states, the number of hit-and-run accidents decreased, as well as the number of uninsured or underinsured drivers. Supporters of the bill maintain that the legislation will also make roads safer by ensuring that all the drivers are properly trained, licensed, and insured, and it will help people who are currently ineligible for licenses get to jobs and family obligations, especially in areas without public transit.
“We have roughly 185,000 immigrants without status living here in Massachusetts. They are our friends, our family, our co-workers, our students, and right now unfortunately any time they go to drive a car to drop the kids off at school, or go to a medical appointment, or go to a grocery store, or go to work, they have to break the law,” said State Sen. Brendan Crighton.
The main misconception about this newly-adopted legislation was that it would allow undocumented immigrants the ability to vote, said Crighton.
“It’s just simply not true; this bill only allows them to have driver’s licenses,” he said.
Crighton said that a driver’s license is not needed to register to vote, and “for automatic voter registration you have to prove that you are a citizen to be automatically registered.”
“This changes nothing about citizenship status, this changes nothing about anyone’s ability to vote — all the bill does is allow residents to earn a driver’s license,” said Crighton.
Baker earlier vetoed the bill because it failed “to include any measures to distinguish standard Massachusetts driver’s licenses issued to persons who demonstrate lawful presence from those who do not,” and that it restricts the Registry’s ability to share citizenship information “with those entities responsible for ensuring that only citizens register for and vote in our elections.”
Republican State Auditor candidate Anthony Amore said the new legislation would increase RMV workloads, and that would be hard to implement, because the RMV employees will have to work with foreign state IDs. Amore spent five years as an immigration inspector in the early 1990s, and he often had to inspect passports from those entering the United States.
“I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what a valid birth certificate or citizenship card from name-the-country looks like. If someone comes from Estonia with an Estonian citizenship card, I wouldn’t know, and I spent years looking at these things,” said Amore.
Amore endorsed a proposal, later rejected, by Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr to create effectively a separate driver’s license category for undocumented immigrants that could not also be used as a valid form of government identification.
House and Senate leaders were quick to announce their intentions to override the veto this week, knowing they had the support of more than the necessary two-thirds of members. Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, an initial House co-sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement Wednesday that she is “disappointed that the Governor is spreading misinformation about voting access.”
“Governor Baker’s own RMV has been processing driver’s licenses for years for those already eligible to drive but ineligible to vote such as 16- and 17-year-olds, people with Green Cards, student and worker visas, and TPS status,” she said.
Senate President Karen Spilka pointed out that the bill has language calling for the secretary of state “to make regulations to make sure that it’s implemented in the way that it is intended.”
“As the speaker said, I don’t see this the same way the House and the Senate see it,” Baker said. “That’s democracy.”
Oksana Kotkina can be reached at [email protected].
