Freedom Line Blog

When it was passed back in 2003, New Mexico’s law allowing illegal immigrants to receive state drivers’ licenses was billed as a way to make the roads safer by requiring illegals to pass a driving test and carry insurance.

For all the hoopla, a recent study showed that New Mexico is second in the nation for percentage of uninsured drivers on the road at 25.7 percent.  As for making New Mexico safer, a different reality has emerged:

The unintended consequence has been an eruption in criminal rings assisting illegal immigrants in obtaining New Mexico driver’s licenses. In the past year, the state has indicted members of at least seven operations on fraud charges.

The consequence may have been unintended, but it was foreseeable.  Extending a legal privilege to a person whose very existence breaks the law of the country encourages more law-breaking.

It’s a good thing for New Mexico that newly elected Governor Susana Martinez is a former prosecutor.  Too bad for America that President Barack Obama isn’t.

I’ll write more about this locally, because it is a scandal of incompetence, but…. if ANYbody wonders why most Americans don’t want government functionaries controlling access to medical care or insurance, I had a perfect reminder this morning.  Having just relocated back to my wife’s home city of Mobile, AL, I went this morning (with her) to the driver’s license office, run by the state Department of Motor Vehicles, just to transfer my license from Virginia back to Alabama. Since they still had my old Alabama license on file in their computer system from five years ago, and I moved back to the same address, it should have been a snap.

Think again.

Amidst some of the worst-organized, most inefficient, most confusing, most inattentive “service” I have EVER seen in any government office (and boy oh boy, is THAT saying a lot!), I watched as they processed about six people per hour in my little area (simple license transfers rather than new drivers who needed driving tests, etc.) for the first two hours.  Eventually, my wife and I made it out of there after THREE HOURS AND THIRTY-NINE MINUTES.

This is what happens when there is NO incentive for service people to actually provide decent service.  I watched as noly one window of four went unserviced for more than an hour; I watched as “workers” who had sat at their windows for no more than about 90 minutes then picked up their purses and left the building for extended breaks; and I sat there, agape, as the one thing nobody ever asked me was to show any sign of Alabama residency: Just about the only info they SHOULD require (for something that establishes, among other things, voting eligibility) was the one thing they didn’t ask for.  (No wonder we conservatives worry about vote fraud!)

This is what happens when government entities run things. This is why government shouldn’t run much of anything.  It is certainly why government functionaries in far-flung locales shouldn’t be making decisions about whether we do or don’t qualify for certain medical treatments.