OPINION

Out of the Shadows... and Into the Voting Booth?

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

My teenage son is a law-abiding American citizen. To obtain his driver's permit this year, he brought his birth certificate, Social Security card, passport and verification that he completed an approved driver's school course. It took a half-dozen trips back and forth between various government agencies to clear all the paperwork hurdles.

Every American citizen who has navigated such bureaucratic hurdles at a local Department of Motor Vehicles should be outraged at the open borders spectacles in New Jersey and New York this week. With the impeachment charade absorbing all the national media's oxygen, however, you probably didn't see more than a 10-second blip of these alarming developments on TV. Newsflash: America first nationalism is not winning.

Hundreds of illegal immigrants and advocates took to the streets and marched on the statehouse in Trenton, New Jersey, demanding driver's licenses without having to produce any citizenship papers. Both the New Jersey Assembly and the Senate approved the measure on Monday while defiant, entitled protesters screamed "Si, se pudo!" (Yes, we can!) and "Licencias, ya!" (Licenses now!). Identity thieves, drug cartels and human traffickers are also cheering "Yes, we can!"

In New York, thousands of illegal immigrants similarly flooded DMVs statewide to take advantage of the new "Green Light" law, which allows them to obtain licenses by simply presenting foreign consular IDs. The Mexican matricula consular card, as I've long reported, is a notoriously fraud-prone document with little to no authentication procedures to verify identity. Meddling Mexican officials hand out matricula cards like Pez candy. They are intentionally designed as get-out-of-deportation cards and gateways to opening bank accounts in America.

Instead of a Social Security card, which American citizens have to present, illegal immigrants can just write up an affidavit stating that they don't have a Social Security card. If my son had presented such a letter at our Colorado DMV (which also issues driver's licenses to illegal immigrants), he would have been laughed out of the office.

So, where's ICE? Remember: New Jersey and New York are sanctuary jurisdictions that brazenly harbor and shelter illegal immigrants. The Green Light law explicitly bars ICE from having access to DMV records. As the Center for Immigration Studies points out, the legislation now creates a situation in which "a foreign nation, Canada, freely shares its DMV information with CBP and ICE," while "the state of New York will refuse to do so."

Pay close attention to this insanity. It's not just about rewarding law-breakers with driving privileges. Our country's election integrity is under siege by foreign influence. Mass migration, legal and illegal, is bringing in millions of potential new voters who support gun control, socialized medicine, expanded welfare, free speech restrictions and resistance to immigration enforcement. Do the political math:

Illegal immigrant driver's licenses + Motor Voter + Soros-funded naturalization and registration drives + anti-Trump resistance lawsuits against voter citizenship checks = recipe for systemic voter fraud, more amnesty, and a permanent Democratic ruling majority.

In New York alone, some 265,000 illegal immigrants are projected to obtain their driver's licenses over the next three years. Earlier this year, after citizens passed a referendum barring licenses for illegal immigrants in Oregon, state Democrats handed them over anyway. Fifteen states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico now confer driving privileges on illegal immigrants. Latino groups, the Mexican government, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Charles Koch-funded Libre Initiative all banded together to secure these "America last" legislative victories.

Next step: Out of the shadows... and into the voting booths? The special interests of "Open Borders, Inc." on the left and right all vehemently deny that illegal alien and noncitizen voter fraud happens. But it does. And it's not just illegal border jumpers but also visa overstayers and other immigration phonies. How quickly we forget:

Illegal alien Nuradin Abdi -- the suspected shopping mall bomb plotter from Somalia -- was registered to vote in the battleground state of Ohio through the DMV.

So was convicted al-Qaida agent Iyman Faris, who planned to sabotage the Brooklyn Bridge and had entered the country fraudulently from Pakistan on a student visa.

In the battleground state of Florida, indicted terror suspect Sami Al-Arian illegally cast his ballot in a Tampa referendum in 1994 while his citizenship application was pending.

And in New Jersey just two years ago, the Public Interest Legal Foundation revealed after a six-month review of New Jersey county voter registration files that thanks to the federal Motor Voter system, "616 admitted and officially recorded noncitizens in 11 counties engaged on some level with the NJ voter registration system;" "nine percent of aliens self-reporting their status also cast ballots prior;" and "75 percent of noncitizens were invited to register while receiving driver's licenses or in other government transactions like community college admissions or public schools."

Imagine if American citizens took to the streets and raised their voices to stop the spread of driver's licenses for people here illegally in numbers that matched the open borders hordes in New York and New Jersey. Instead, Beltway bread-and-circuses distractions dominate the airwaves while the sovereignty saboteurs drive American law and order off the cliff.

Michelle Malkin's email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com.