A driver’s license that identifies its owner as an undocumented immigrant will lead to discrimination, racial profiling, and consequently deportation, according to dozens of members of pro-immigrant organizations during a protest on October 28 in front of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s office in Manhattan.

Javier Valdés of the New York Immigration Coalition said that he was protesting because the governor, after 10 months of negotiating “in good faith” with immigrant organizations to improve the life of undocumented immigrants, “after five weeks of pressure from the anti-immigrant groups, he turned his back on us, changing his position on drivers’ licenses.”

Valdés is referring to the announcement that Governor Spitzer made on Saturday, in which he changed his plan to allow undocumented immigrants to have the same type of license as New Yorkers residing in the country legally. Instead, the governor said that the state’s undocumented immigrants will be able to obtain a license that will allow them to drive, but will not be accepted as identification to board planes or cross borders.

“We do not want the governor to create a culture that separates documented from undocumented people. We don’t want an undocumented person to have a different license from anyone else. We are all equal, and undocumented people should be treated with the same dignity,” said Valdés, asserting that a license of that kind “is a stigma that will facilitate discrimination against immigrants.”

Spitzer, in reaction to the protest outside his office, said by telephone that he always said that he would comply with federal norms established by the Real ID Act, designed to keep undocumented immigrants or terrorists from obtaining drivers’ licenses.

“The traditional driver’s license, which will be available to undocumented individuals, will be the same license that we have been talking about during the dialogue we have had for the past few weeks, but the other license will be different. The one that satisfies the Real ID will require additional documents to get it,” the governor said, indicating that the traditional license for undocumented immigrants will have an indication that will say that it is not a form of federal identification.

For Teresa Arieta, of the del Cuzcatlán Hispanic Center, with the change of plans, the governor “is placing us in a third category. A week ago he said that he was going to bring all the immigrants out of the shadows, giving them licenses, and he didn’t say that it was going to be in the three categories that he’s saying now,” said Arieta.

Guillermo Chacón, of the Nacional Salvadorean American Network, said that the license announced on Saturday by the governor “is a kind of apartheid, because what person is going to solicit a license that identifies him as undocumented?”

Udi Ofer, of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that, with the new plan, “Governor Spitzer is resuscitating a piece of legisaltion (the Real ID Act) that has been described universally by many people as anti-American, anti-civil liberties, and anti-immigrant.”

Radhamés Pérez, of the Aurora Community Action in Washington Heights, said that the decision made by the governor, “is a step back in the effort to maintain New York as a place of liberty, tolerance, and plurality.”

Senator Martin Golden, Republican from Brooklyn, confirmed, however, that it is time “for Spitzer to understand that granting driver’s licenses without requiring a Social Security number is a mistake.” Besides, he explained that the Republican majority in the Senate will try to stop Spitzer’s new plan to make sure that undocumented immigrants do not obtain licenses.