Green Lights and U-turns in State Driver’s License Policies for Immigrants

• In Event: The Micro-politics of Immigrant Integration

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, twelve states and the District of Columbia have enacted legislation currently in force to expand access to driver’s license for undocumented immigrants. However, the road to driver’s licenses for immigrants in U.S. states has never been a straight line. During the “license wave” of 2013, eight states passed legislation expanding immigrant access to driver’s licenses, and Hawaii and Delaware passed their own immigrant driving legislation two years later. But in 2014, Oregon voters approved a ballot initiative that halted the state’s efforts to allow unauthorized immigrants to drive. Oregon was not the first to take a U-turn. By 2007, Tennessee had repealed its own law expanding license to immigrants passed in 2001. And Utah passed legislation curtailing the driving privileges of immigrants its legislature had approved in 2005.

How can we explain state variation in state legislation authorizing undocumented immigrants to drive? The rise in state-level immigrant policies, such as driver’s license bills, has been referred to as the “new immigration federalism” and has sparked a robust new wave of scholarly literature. Existing studies aimed at exploring sub-federal policy on immigrant issues in recent decades as well as explaining state variation have tended to focus on partisanship – the bluer the state, the more expansive the immigrant policy regime is likely to be. In more recent scholarship, Andrea Silva has looked at state opportunity structures and the role of direct democracy to explain Oregon’s recent reversal of immigrant driving policies.

However, most literature on contemporary immigration federalism does not place driver’s license campaigns in a broader historical context both within and across state lines. For example, the legacy of past failed attempts at extending driving privileges to noncitizens in New York have had a significant deterrent effect on immigrant initiatives in New York State. After former Governor Eliot Spitzer’s failed attempt in 2007 to issue an executive order extending drivers’ licenses to undocumented immigrants, which sparked a national backlash, New York policy makers have been weary of state-based initiatives to extend rights to undocumented immigrants. In interviews, New York public elected officials have repeatedly stated in they would not take action on initiatives such as the DREAM Act for fear of “pulling a Spitzer.” As such, the historical missteps on political entrepreneurs in New York’s past have had an ongoing effect on shaping the current terrain of possibility for driver’s license bills and other bills expanding immigrant rights.


This paper looks to two case studies, Oregon and New York, in order to explore how the successes and failures of campaigns both within and across state lines impact the political opportunity structure for passing affirmative legislation to expand licenses to immigrants. In order to better understand the politics of state immigrant driver’s licenses policy, this paper looks to media coverage, interviews with movement leaders, and vote analysis over the period of 2005 to the 2016. In particular, this paper is interested in the process of policy diffusion and how narratives about policy change travel within states and across the country over time. This analysis seeks to reveal how an examination of the past routes of driver’s license policy making influence the road forward for immigration politics and American federalism.

Author

• Jackie Vimo, New School for Social Research