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Isn't that an impossibly high standard?
Like, you can prove that you were issued a driver's license, but you can't prove that you have a valid one now. I'm sure there's a way around that issue.
For a non-citizen, if you have only 6 months left on your visa and you have to get your drivers license renewed, then then that license will only be valid for 6 months. Moreover, if you go to a local courthouse to renew it, your number won't come up on a regular search. It is necessary to go to a DMV building to get a license renewed. The drivers license number database apparently flags when a license belongs to a non-citizen, or at least flags it when additional steps for renewal are necessary. I don't know if this flag is visible to law enforcement when they search a license number, but there's a good chance it is. I suppose if you violated the conditions of your visa, then you could be residing illegally while still appearing to have a valid license. However, I suspect since they can't issue a license that is valid beyond the expiration date of a visa, that violating the visa would then automatically void the drivers license
Legal aliens are not eligible for Enhanced IDs given one of the requirements is an active US passport and the ID expires the same day the passport does.
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The way around the issue is that the cop takes your DL back to the squad car and looks you up in the state database of drivers' licenses. There's no analogous database of citizens.
Then it's not so much "Nobody carries around..." as "There is nothing that could be carried for...". That seems like a bigger problem.
Yes. If you want effective in-country immigration enforcement, then you need a citizen register and either ID cards or a trustworthy biometric database so ID can be checked online. (Only Estonia has successfully implemented the latter to date, and it gets harder roughly quadratically as your population increases.)
Given the ubiquity of driving licenses as ID and that the SSA already has a de facto citizen register, this would be easy for the US to do - although a few long-standing illegal residents with fraudulently acquired SSNs (or genuine ones acquired on a now-expired working visa) will slip through the net. This is particularly true for the US because birthright citizenship makes the whole problem easier - the hardest part of verifying citizenship in non-birthright countries is verifying parent's status at the time of birth. But the people who are most committed to stronger immigration enforcement are by and large the same people who are deeply committed to the idea that the Anglosphere doesn't need no stinking citizen register and is not a papieren, bitte culture, nein und fock auf - so it doesn't happen.
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