In August of 2018, my father-in-law was killed by a car while crossing the street. The driver was looking at her cellphone and didn’t see him. She was white, a U.S. citizen and a single parent.
We could have advocated to send her to jail, but that would have meant separating her from her daughter, and from her parents, who depended on her for support in dealing with her mother’s late-stage cancer. Instead, we asked that she be required to speak to teenagers about the dangers of using cellphones while driving as part of her community service sentence.
The founder of the movement to repeal the Work and Family Mobility Act also had a family member who was hit by a car. My heart goes out to her because I know how it feels to lose someone you love, especially when it’s unexpected.
But the driver’s immigration status is not the cause of her tragedy. There is no statistical evidence to show that undocumented immigrants cause a greater number of vehicular deaths. In fact, the Cato Institute reports that the highest vehicular homicide rates are in states with low populations of undocumented residents.
Allowing undocumented residents the right to legally drive has been done successfully in 17 states. This does not give them citizenship or voting privileges. It merely allows them to take their children to school or to the doctor without fear of being put in jail or sent away from their families, back to a country where they fled death threats.
We chose not to separate the driver who killed my father-in-law from her family because we didn’t see any point in ruining so many other people’s just because they had ruined ours. Please join me in voting “Yes” on Question 4.
D. Dina Friedman
Hadley