The question on the minds of the ethnic press—many of whose readers fear the feds' knock on the door—wasn't so much who'd get the new drivers license, but whether anyone in federal law enforcement would get a look at the list of people who had it. Spitzer tried to assure the room that, "There is nothing in the database that will say whether a person is documented or not." But even if every member of the Spitzer administration gets the license rather than the Real ID, it seems fair to predict that most people who hold the license will be undocumented immigrants. A federal agency looking for such immigrants might be keen to get the list of license holders.
Spitzer said there'd be no data sharing, although he allowed that his administration would provide information that had been subpoenaed. He added that he was considering issuing an executive order prohibiting police and others from drawing an inference that a person with the new driver's license was an illegal alien. That did not provide the reporters in the room with a rock-solid recommendation they could pass on to readers.
"I think it's just going to create a two-tier system and people will be easily detected. People are very apprehensive. Most people I talk to aren't going to get it, at least not at first," Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, a reporter for Nowy Dziennik, said Monday. "They're going to wait and see. And even if Spitzer tries to assure us that he will get it and that most Americans will be too lazy to get the Real ID, at a certain point these licenses will expire and people will apply for the Real ID. That's very obvious to me."
"He told us that the DMV was not the ICE," said Zaheer, referring to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. "It's up to reader to decide, are they going to believe in him or not?"
The contrast between what the governor proposed in September and what he agreed to last week might be substantial, but the administration doesn't own up to having lost anything in the process, let alone having handled the situation badly. They argue that New York's decision to comply with the Real ID act neutralizes any security concerns about giving IDs to undocumented immigrants and allows the state to license more drivers. They shrug that anti-immigrant commentators didn't lash back any fiercer than expected. The governor didn't cave in at all, according to his office.
Spitzer impressed Zaheer and Kern- Jedrychowska by inviting the community press in. Others in attendance seemed grateful too – taking plenty of pictures of Spitzer on their digital cameras as he rose to leave the briefing – even if his answers didn't gel with New York's immigrants' street-level view.
Kern-Jedrychowska said many in her community never thought Spitzer's original plan would be realized, and wondered why the governor wasn't savvier.
"He should have known better. If the immigrants I spoke to were 100 percent sure—they were sure—that it wasn't going to go through, then he should have known better," she said. "I don't think that he explained why he has changed his mind. He got a lot of people's hopes up."
