New Yorkers Oppose Spitzer License Plan, Poll Shows

ALBANY —Armed with results of the first poll on Governor Spitzer's proposal to make it easier for illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses, Senate Republicans on Monday sought to delay the policy's implementation and warned they could dismantle it in budget negotiations beginning in January.

But Mr. Spitzer, who said he can start the policy in December without the Legislature, was undeterred by a Senate hearing in which his Department of Motor Vehicles commissioner was cross-examined without break for four hours.

"The policy change is critical to ensuring the safety and security of New Yorkers and the governor would never abdicate this foremost obligation simply to appease those peddling fear and hatred," a Spitzer spokeswoman, Christine Anderson, said after the hearing. Seventy-two percent of voters in Monday's Siena College poll said they were opposed to "the governor's plan to allow undocumented immigrants to get New York driver's licenses." Twenty-two percent of those polled supported the plan of the once widely popular governor, according to the Siena Research Institute.

Mr. Spitzer's DMV Commissioner, David Swarts, defended the plan Monday as a way to get hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants already in New York into the state database. Mr. Spitzer said that will make the streets safer for drivers, reduce auto insurance rates, and provide a better tool for law enforcement and homeland security to track illegal immigrants. He noted several homeland security and law enforcement experts support it.

"Fear is a major element in the misrepresentation of this issue," Mr. Swarts told senators. He described Republicans' criticism as "hysterical rhetoric" that was "deliberately misstated."

The New York Immigration Coalition accused the Senate Republicans of loading the hearing, billed as the first of several, with opponents of Mr. Spitzer's plan.