Resources / Ripples & Wipeouts

Call me stupid, but I had never mentally made the connection that even though many of my ESL (English as a Second Language) students could and did drive in the U.S., that they were doing so illegally.  However, this all became glaringly clear in my brain when I read in the New York Times that New York Governor Elliot Spitzer formally announced that he has abandoned his efforts to make driver’s licenses accessible to undocumented immigrants.  As these two pieces of the immigration puzzle clicked together, I suddenly found myself grappling with a lot of other emotions.

I lived in Mexico for almost a year, and have been involved in ESL tutoring since college.  I have heard firsthand countless stories about people who made every attempt to enter legally, only to be turned down at the last minute.  Many of these individuals then illegally immigrated to the U.S. Just last week, my ESL students and I got into a discussion about why people come to the U.S. in the first place.  Their response was simple: money. 

A few students recounted stories of how they had held relatively prestigious jobs in their countries (Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Ethiopia and Senegal were all represented in this particular discussion).  However, these prestigious jobs still did not pay as well as low-paying jobs in the U.S. doing house painting, cleaning, food service, etc. Now imagine what a wage difference there must be between a person working on a farm in Latin America or Africa and a person working on a farm in the U.S.! After exhausting legal resources, people trying to create better lives for themselves and their families are now in the U.S., and in the cases of many of my students, proud New York City _________.  You fill in the blank, because technically they aren’t residents.  Occupants?  Aliens?  Perhaps nothing at all.

I know that my students were hoping to gain access to driver’s licenses.  Most of them work hard every day cleaning houses, embroidering T-shirts, or working construction.  If they drive to work, they surely fear the day when they get stopped for a routine traffic check.  What happens to them then?  I do not claim to have the answers, nor a good solution to the problem. 

It seems to me that we as a country need to make some big attitude changes, not only towards undocumented immigrants, but also towards our own government’s diplomacy.  We should be urging the U.S. to promote policies that could ultimately create self-sufficiency in countries that are widely represented by immigrants in the U.S.  This would give people the option of staying in their native countries and being able to earn enough money there to support their families and lead productive lives.  In contrast, we continue to promote policies that undermine local economies and limit options for low-wage workers abroad.  Most immigrants without documents aren’t evil or trying to one-up the American government.  They are simply trying to live and thrive in this new world where the disparity between the rich and the poor is growing by the minute.  Until we help to facilitate the narrowing of that gap, is a driver’s license really too much to ask?

--AMI