OKLAHOMA CITY — A bill allowing nonresidents who file state taxes to use their individual Tax Identification Number to obtain a state driver’s license cleared the Senate’s Aeronautics and Transportation Committee last week on a 7-5 vote.
Senate Bill 669 expands the eligibility for driver’s licenses to people who pay their state income tax with an Individual Tax Identification Number, its author, state Sen. Michael Brooks, said.
Brooks, a Democrat from Oklahoma City, said the bill would prevent Oklahoma’s nonresidents who obtain the licenses from registering to vote. He said the bill includes language that creates a quarterly auditing system to do one-for-one auditing to ensure that “no one who gets their driver’s license this way would be able to qualify to register to vote.”
The bill also
prevents nonresidents who use Individual Tax Identification Number from obtaining a commercial driver’s license. Brooks said driver’s licenses issued under the bill would include the designation ‘nonresident.’
He said those licenses would also be more expensive.
“There is an imposition of an additional surcharge for anybody who applies using an I-10 number to get a driver’s license of $50,” he said. Brooks said the additional fee would generate between $1 million and $4 million in revenue.
While the measure could benefit students and researchers, Brooks said the measure would help address problems for about 33,000 nonresidents currently in Oklahoma. He said that group of nonresidents paid about $26 million in income taxes last year.
In addition to reducing the number of nonresidents without driver’s licenses, Brooks said the bill could reduce the number of those without auto insurance and increase the number of nonresidents who use state banks and other financial services.
“There are many people in the state of Oklahoma who, because they don’t have one of those government-issued nine-digit numbers they are unbanked,” he said. “As a result, they keep their money in a mattress or under a pillow or in the closet and so by encouraging more people to be able to get Individual Tax ID numbers, the prospect is that many more people will be banked as a result which makes things safer for all the people in all those neighborhoods.”
At least two agriculture industry groups announced their support for the bill. In a posting on its webpage, the Oklahoma Farm Bureau said the bill will be beneficial to both farmers and ranchers across the state who hire immigrant laborers to work on their farms and ranches.
“It will lower the numbers of migrant workers driving without a license, which risks liability to the farm owner and causes significant delays if a farm vehicle driven by an unlicensed worker is impounded or detained,” the group said.
Brooks said the measure was also supported by the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association and the Oklahoma State Troopers Association. A posting on the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs’ website notes that the right-leaning organization also supports the bill.
The bill echoes House Bill 2114, which is authored by state Rep. Daniel Pae (R-Lawton). In 2022, Brooks authored almost identical legislation. At that time, Senate Pro Tempore Greg Treat said the bill “had a lot of merit to it.” That bill, Senate Bill 1591, passed the Senate on a 30-11 vote but stalled in the House Rules Committee.
Should the measure become law, Oklahoma would join 16 other states and the District of Columbia which have passed legislation allowing nonresidents to obtain driver’s licenses.
In Massachusetts, lawmakers are reviewing similar legislation. That bill, the Work and Family Mobility Act, would make driver’s licenses available to nonresidents and undocumented immigrants if they are able to provide a foreign birth certificate, passport or evidence of current residency in the state.
As in Oklahoma, advocates there said the bill would improve public safety by increasing the number of insured drivers in the state.
Brooks’ bill pushes back against legislation passed in 2007 that targeted the state’s undocumented residents.
At that time, Oklahoma’s Legislature passed House Bill 1804 which leveled harsh penalties against undocumented residents. That proposal, written by then-state Rep. Randy Terrill prevented the state from providing services to undocumented residents including issuing any form of identification such as voter identification, driver’s licenses and birth certificates.
Terrill’s bill also made it a felony to transport an undocumented resident or to provide them shelter and required all state employers to verify the immigration status of all new employees.
House Bill 1804 was signed by Gov. Brad Henry in May 2007. However, several portions of the bill were later found to be unconstitutional by a federal court.
Since then, problems caused by drivers without the proper insurance coupled with the increased need for farm laborers have tempered the Legislature’s anti-immigrant attitude, though some lawmakers were critical of the bill.
A floor amendment filed by state Sen. Nathan Dahm (R-Broken Arrow) would remove the nonresident designation on Senate Bill 669 and replace it with the words ‘illegal alien’ in red letter “in no less than 16-point font.”
Dahm was one of five senators who voted against the bill. The full Senate is expected to hear the measure soon.