Californians were deceived when the state’s Democrat-dominated legislature and governor rammed through legislation granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. The extraordinary step of granting drivers licenses to people with no right to be in this country was justified to Californians on the basis of the need to reduce the number of uninsured motorists, who cause damage and injury to other without having any means to pay for the losses they cause. 

It is now clear, after a year and a half, that this sales pitch was a fraud. Hollie McKay of Fox News reports:

“It is hard to pinpoint whether the bill has had an impact or not,” said Jeffrey Spring, spokesman for the American Automobile Association’s California chapter. “We have no way of knowing.”

The law, and a three-year, $141 million program designed to implement it, did not provide for a way to measure if illegal immigrants are any more inclined to buy insurance.

“There are no statistics regarding how many new license holders under AB 60, purchased vehicle insurance,” said California Department of Motor Vehicles spokesman Artemio Armenta. “We cannot relate our vehicle insurance data to driver licenses because the vehicle registration information is only associated with individual vehicles and cannot be used to identify any trends related to AB 60. Drivers under AB 60 are not tracked or singled out any differently.”

Ponder this for a moment: the basic architecture of this new program, established at great cost to the taxpayers, made it impossible to determine of the promised results were being achieved. Accountability was designed out of the process – a government bureaucrat’s standard operating procedure.

Instead, the program relied on a sense of civic responsibility on the part of people who by definition have none, since they flaunted the laws of the country to be here. Illegals are supposed to buy insurance out of civic duty? Perhaps this explains why the fantasy was entertained: generous subsidies (the progressives’ favorite tool) were provided:

If licensed illegal immigrants want to buy auto insurance, the state provides a low-cost option. The California Department of Insurance markets the state-sponsored, Low Cost Auto Insurance Program for low income earners through Spanish-language media. Plans provide minimal liability coverage with annual premiums as low as $241. The coverage is less than what is mandated for other drivers who purchase policies through private insurance companies, paying a statewide average of just below $2,000 per year.

But it is even cheaper not to buy insurance. And the insurance only benefits the people harmed by the illegal immigrant driver. If you have no assets in this country, having sent your savings back home to, for instance, build a nice house for your family, there is no way the person you hurt can recover medical bills or pay for the auto repairs by suing you.

The nation’s most populous state, home to an estimated 2.67 million illegal immigrants (more than 6% of its population), has defrauded its citizens, and I hope I will be excused for thinking that the design of the program to prevent any real data from being discovered was deliberate.

 Hat tip: David Paulin