July 20, 2005
By Taft Wireback
Greensboro News and Record
They are licenses given by North Carolina to illegal immigrants who live in New Jersey but who come to the Tar Heel State by the busload or vanload to get the document that allows them to drive, work, bank and rent housing, said Sonia Barria, the court administrator for the town of Dover, N.J.
"We ask them. We speak Spanish and we ask them, 'How did you get a license?' " Barria said in a phone interview last week. "They say, 'We went on a bus with a group of people and that is how it happened.' "
Her court confiscates North Carolina licenses from illegal immigrants under the theory "they were probably obtained under false pretenses," said Barria, whose town has 15,115 residents and covers 2 square miles in Morris County.
We're painfully aware of that problem. There have been numerous attempts at rectification in the past several years, most recently by Sue Myrick. The problem we have in NC is, despite being a reliable "red" state at the national level, our state itself is governed by Democrats, and has been since Reconstruction, with the same battling factions actually preceding any modern political party and even the country itself. It's fairly entrenched, obviously, much to the frustration of the conservative majority in the state. We're working on it, and have been for a while now.