Bad Driving

New York Times
Published: May 27, 2007

By accident or design, Suffolk County has come up with a law-enforcement net good at catching just the fish that County Executive Steve Levy wants: Latino immigrants without papers, some of his least-favorite people.

The net is the police department’s new policy of arresting drivers caught without licenses or identification. There are lots of unlicensed drivers out there, but those who can show ID usually go home with a summons. The others now get locked up. In Suffolk, particularly in Farmingville and Brentwood, that means Latino illegal immigrants. Newsday examined police records and reported last week that 77 percent of the drivers arrested from April 11, when the policy began, to May 2 were Latino.

That striking disproportion led the Suffolk District Attorney to raise concerns about racial profiling. The department suspended the policy briefly, then reinstated it after giving assurances that officers would apply the rules evenhandedly.

There is no evidence that the police are acting improperly, but there should be no confusion about the environment behind this crackdown. This is Mr. Levy’s territory, where harsh policies and tough talk have sent the insistent message that poor Latino immigrants, particularly day laborers, are presumed to be here illegally and are thus unwelcome. The police initiative began, in fact, shortly after the Legislature defeated a harsh anti-loitering bill directed at day laborers in Farmingville. For lawmakers who have tried and failed to get all those Latino men off the streets and sidewalks, a sudden onslaught of driver arrests looks a lot like Plan B.

The immigrants caught in the crackdown were already in a bind. To eat they have to work, to work they have to drive, but since they lack authorization, they can’t get licenses or insurance. Unlicensed, uninsured drivers should never get behind the wheel, of course — not in Suffolk, which leads New York in traffic fatalities — or anywhere else. County residents can therefore take comfort in knowing that illegal drivers are being taken off the road.

But they should also realize that a crackdown does nothing to attack the dense thickets of perversity in a broken immigration system. Communities like ours embrace hard-line initiatives and hard-line politicians like the unassailably popular Mr. Levy. We scorn illegal immigrants but happily accept the work they do.

The dissonance is considerable, because even those who deplore illegal immigration benefit greatly from it. If you like Mr. Levy’s brand of rigid enforcement and don’t want to be an immigration hypocrite, then don’t support industries that rely on illegal labor. Don’t go to restaurants or hotels and don’t let any landscapers or nannies near your property until you check everyone’s green cards.

And if you like aggressive efforts to arrest immigrant drivers, then don’t get upset when you see where they end up afterward: on sidewalks and in parking lots, waiting for rides to work, and packing into houses with other men who lack wheels.

Tackle one form of unruliness and another blossoms. Perverse, isn’t it? In a more lawful and rational system, workers would have a way out of the shadows. They could prove they were safe drivers, buy insurance and carry ID. The United States Senate’s new immigration bill has provisions to make legalization possible for 12 million people, but “amnesty” hawks have viciously trashed that part, echoing the angry mood that is prevalent in Suffolk.

Here’s a way to protect the public and promote safe driving: let immigrants get legalized and licensed. And let laborers gather safely at hiring sites off the road, to bring noise and chaos to a minimum.

But hard-liners do not want lawfulness and order on those terms — not in Suffolk, anyway, where many view hiring sites as something evil. They want to impose order the slow, tortured way, by picking immigrants off, one bad driver at a time.