The Sept. 11 commission found that the 19 hijackers held 16 driver's licenses and 14 state-issued ID cards, which enabled these terrorists to rent cars and apartments, open bank accounts, take flying lessons, and otherwise blend into U.S. society while they planned their attacks. At least two of them (including Hani Hanjour, the pilot of the plane that flew into the Pentagon) were illegally in the United States (because they had overstayed their visas) at the time they obtained their driver's licenses.
Driver's licenses are a crucial national security issue. In 2004, the Border Patrol apprehended 75,389 people not from Mexico illegally entering the United States. They came from more than 150 nations, including every major state sponsor of terrorism.
The open-borders lobby is crying that the REAL ID Act would give us a national ID card, something that sounds un-American. The truth is that requiring states to stop issuing driver's licenses to illegals is the best way to prevent the demand for a national ID card, which might prove irresistible if we suffer another terrorist attack on our own soil.
The REAL ID Act would make no change in the Federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act, as well as each state's privacy laws, which currently protect all the information in state DMV databases. H.R. 418 requires additional privacy measures to protect data privacy and to compel states to protect identities from theft and fraud.
The open-borders lobby, fearful of losing the battle in public opinion and in state legislatures, runs to judges in the hope that they will ignore the will of the people. They found a friendly judge in New York, as noted above.
But in heartland America, the result was different. A class-action suit was brought to get activist judges to overturn Iowa's law that limits the licensing of foreign nationals to the period of time the foreign national is authorized to be in the United States, and in no case longer than two years.
This litigation wound its way to the Iowa Supreme Court, which in Sanchez vs. Iowa, emphatically rejected every single statutory and constitutional claim of the illegal immigrants. Noting that Iowa had an estimated 24,000 illegal immigrants in 2000, the Court agreed with the state that licensing should not be allowed "to be a facilitator for the concealment of illegal aliens."