Unearthed video exposes El-Sayeds opinion on drivers licenses for illegal immigrants

Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Michigan, once proposed allowing undocumented immigrants to secure driver’s licenses, making the case that not doing so would be discriminatory.“We’ve got to make sure that in this state we are not discriminating against documentation status.Right now, if you’re undocumented, you don’t get access to a driver’s license.

You’re stuck,” El-Sayed said in a 2018 campaign interview.At the time, El-Sayed was running for governor.Eight years later, as he looks to join the US Senate, the resurfaced clip sheds light on El-Sayed’s past thinking about how local governments should interact with illegal aliens and raises questions about whether granting them state identification would in some ways legitimize their presence in the US.Hans von Spakovsky, an elections expert for Advancing American Freedom, explained that a license can act as a doorway to a range of government benefits.“Because America does not have a national ID card like the Europeans and other nations, state driver’s licenses are a stand-in for that ID card.Issuing driver’s licenses to aliens will help them in all the instances where a license is needed, from opening bank accounts to all types of other transactions,” Spakovsky said.Spakovsky noted that I-9 forms, paperwork for employment eligibility, regularly require little else than a license.“The key to getting aliens to self-deport would be to ensure that they cannot rent apartments, open bank accounts and take all of the other steps necessary to live and work in the US,” Spakovsky said.“Providing them driver’s licenses is a huge step in allowing them to easily live and work in the United States,” he added.In the 2018 clip, El-Sayed seemed concerned that illegal aliens would be ineligible for some of those advantages.“You don’t get access to a lot of the basic things that the state offers everybody else, and I think that’s ridiculous and so we’ve got to ...