Members of Oregonians For Immigration Reform gathered Saturday on campus at the High School Equivalency Program building to protest illegal immigration. Their target: the Mexican consulate issuing matricula consulars – identification cards given to Mexican citizens who can provide a birth certificate, photo ID and proof of residency. The cards allow Mexicans, including illegal immigrants, to obtain driver’s licenses and open bank accounts in the United States.
The protest drew a group of counter-protesters, and Department of Public Safety officers were on hand to keep the peace.
At $27 each, the cards may be cheaper than passports for Mexican travelers. But the OFIR
protesters and their sympathizers have a point: They assert that because legal immigrants from Mexico and other countries obtain Green Cards or other documents, only illegal immigrants need such cards.
The use of the cards has grown from 528,000 to more than 4.7 million last year, according to a Sept. 27 article in the Los Angeles Times. The Mexican Consulate sold about 24,000 cards in Oregon in 2004, according to a Dec. 4 article in The Oregonian.
As many as 7 million illegal immigrants – including 4.8 million Mexicans – lived in the United States in January 2000, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service data.
Issuing these cards raises questions about whether our federal and state governments are handling immigration properly. As stated in the Los Angeles Times article, the matricula consular issue “highlights the contradiction between immigration laws, which forbid the presence of undocumented workers, and immigration reality, which encourages them to spend their paychecks here.”
OFIR members are correct in asserting that illegal immigrants should not be able to receive government-funded social services such as health care and food stamps. The Oregon Department of Human Services currently has a $172 million budget deficit. Those who want to benefit from government services offered in the United States should be legally deemed allowed to do so beforehand.
Moreover, the United States doesn’t record whom the Mexican government is issuing cards to, or whether it is issuing multiple cards to the same person. Mexico itself apparently doesn’t keep clear records of who it issues cards to. Thus many falsified cards may exist and the U.S. remains in the dark about how many aliens are living here.
This causes security concerns, as the protesters point out. For instance, the cards allow holders to board American airplanes. A criminal or terrorist suspect could easily avoid being identified by authorities through the use of a matricula consular or driver’s license that attributes a false name and address to its holder.
According to 2003 congressional testimony by Steve McCraw, assistant director of FBI’s Office for Intelligence, the “Department of Justice and the FBI have concluded that the Matricula Consular is not a reliable form of identification, due to the non-existence of any means of verifying the true identity of the card holder.”
Despite these problems, we must come to terms with the idea that illegal immigrants, primarily seasonal workers from Mexico, form an integral part of Oregon’s agricultural industry. Workers should be granted temporary worker and travel permits that allow the U.S. and Mexican governments to track populations traversing the border to ensure the safety of both immigrants and U.S. citizens.