Guest Column
Who Really Has The Law And Order Position When It Comes To Immigration?
- National Immigration Forum
- January 22, 2008
- The Republican stance on immigration leaves an opening that opponents could drive a truck through. The Democratic candidates have the better position but approach the subject with eggshell timidity. They should stand up for a real debate, and a better country, by forcefully challenging the Republicans on this issue.
- ____________________________________________________________
- Douglas G. Rivlin, Director of Communication, National Immigration Forum, 50 F Street, NW, #300, Washington, DC 20001 USA http://www.immigrationforum.org/ rivlin@immigrationforum.org
Reporters, like everyone else, are in a bind when it comes to the immigration issue. Positions taken on immigration in the political realm are typically referred to as “tough vs. soft,” “open vs. closed,” “more restrictive vs. less restrictive” or “liberal vs. conservative.” On the Republican side, a good deal of the rhetoric about immigration coming from the campaign trail is wrapped in Nixonian appeals to law and order, not coincidentally the name of one candidate’s former TV show.
But two editorials last week turn the law and order argument on its head arguing that the real “tough” position on immigration reform, especially as it relates to crime, would be one that requires immigrants here illegally to come forward to apply for legal status. By doing so, they would be pushed through a vetting process that would allow us to weed out criminals. The same would happen if we channeled more future immigrants through the visa process.
In the Phoenix area, a major crime case seems to have been broken as a suspect, twice deported and in the country illegally, has been identified allegedly as the “Chandler Rapist” who has terrorized the community and its children. In an editorial Thursday, the Arizona Republic makes a strong argument that reforms to our immigration system that require legal status for undocumented workers and channels prospective immigrants through ports of entry would help identify criminals and weed them out.
Real border security - the kind that will assure that when someone is deported, he does not return - has to be part of a multipronged approach. If those who merely want to work are channeled back to the ports of entry with a guest-worker program, the illegal flow will become a trickle composed mostly of felons and others, like Batiz Aceves, whose checkered pasts could make them ineligible to be guest workers. They would be easier for Border Patrol to catch. They would be less able to lurk in our communities and prey on little girls. – Editorial: “A border breach,” Arizona Republic, January 17, 2008
Looking more explicitly at the Republican political contest, Friday’s New York Times editorializes in a similar vein, noting that implied in the “no amnesty” and “attrition” strategy favored by most GOP candidates is implicitly soft on crime. By not creating a system that would bring the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants forward to report themselves, we are missing an opportunity to identify and remove immigrants we do not want here and distinguish them from those we clearly do.
Except for Mr. McCain, the Republican candidates have skirted the issue or, worse, embraced the restrictionist approach known as “attrition.” That amounts to relentlessly tightening the screws in workplaces and homes until illegal immigrants magically, voluntarily disappear. […]
Worst of all, it’s weak on law and order. It is a free pass to the violent criminals we urgently need to hunt down and deport. Attrition means waiting until we stumble across bad people hiding in the vast illegal immigrant haystack. Comprehensive reform, by bringing the undocumented out of the shadows, shrinks the haystack. – Editorial: “One Argument, 12 Million Holes,” New York Times, January 18, 2008
While the relationship between immigration and crime is often misunderstood – the presence of immigrants, including illegal immigrants, is associated with lower, not higher, property and violent crime rates – the editorial analysis is instructive. The varying political approaches to immigration should not be characterized as “tough vs. soft,” “open vs. closed,” “more restrictive vs. less restrictive” or even “liberal vs. conservative.” The universal goal is to get immigration under control and end illegal immigration. The question is whether including and assimilating the 12 million people living here illegally is a more efficient and practical approach than hoping they just leave or can be pushed out.
Read on for the Arizona Republic and New York Times editorials.
ARIZONA REPUBLIC (Editorial): A border breach
Jan. 17, 2008
If the man who was arrested on DNA evidence is convicted of being the "Chandler Rapist," certain facts are unavoidable.
The cruelest of those facts is that little girls were hurt by a monster.
The most hopeful is that he is off the street, thanks to good police work.
The most shameful is that he should not have been in this country.
He should not have been here to harm children and wound our community's sense of security.
We didn't need another example of how badly broken our immigration system is, but now that there is a suspect in the Chandler Rapist case, we have one.
Police believe that Santana Batiz Aceves had been deported twice from California on drug charges.
He returned to this country because of a porous southern border.
He was able to work here for years because employer-sanctions laws passed two decades ago were unenforceable and consequently were not enforced.
Batiz Aceves now faces 47 felony counts, including kidnapping, child molestation, aggravated assault and sexual abuse with a minor.
If he's convicted on all of charges, he could be sentenced to more than 250 years in prison. Even such a long sentence couldn't begin to cover the pain and the nightmarish memories the victims of the crimes will endure for the rest of their lives.
Batiz Aceves' actions, if proved, belong on the long list of reasons why this nation's immigration laws need to be reformed. That is undeniable.
These crimes could be part of the ugly harvest. But the suspect, again, if convicted, would not be typical of the illegal-immigrant population any more than the Marine being sought and accused of the murder of a pregnant fellow soldier in North Carolina would be typical of all Marines.
If convicted, Batiz Aceves would represent the kind of criminal aberration that sadly occurs in every racial, ethnic and socioeconomic group.
A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal noted that during the time when the illegal-immigrant population is estimated to have doubled - between 1994 and 2005 - violent crime declined by 34.2 percent and property crime fell by 26.4 percent, according to the Justice Department.
It would also be a mistake in this case to argue that enforcement alone will solve the problem of illegal immigration.
In recent decades, border security has been beefed up and the number of Border Patrol agents has been dramatically increased. The result was not an end to illegal immigration.
Instead, criminal smuggling organizations grew strong and migrant populations became more permanent. Workers stopped going home. Wives and children joined husbands because border security made return trips more difficult.
Failure to deal with the issue at the national level has resulted in state efforts, such as Arizona's employer-sanctions law. But this is simply another exercise in denial because migration through Arizona will continue even if jobs here become harder to get.
Real border security - the kind that will assure that when someone is deported, he does not return - has to be part of a multipronged approach. If those who merely want to work are channeled back to the ports of entry with a guest-worker program, the illegal flow will become a trickle composed mostly of felons and others, like Batiz Aceves, whose checkered pasts could make them ineligible to be guest workers.
They would be easier for Border Patrol to catch.
They would be less able to lurk in our communities and prey on little girls.
NEW YORK TIMES (Editorial): One Argument, 12 Million Holes
January 18, 2008
Editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/opinion/18fri1.html?ref=opinion
The big fat immigration bill that died last year in Congress was, for all its flaws, an anchor that kept debate tethered firmly to reality. Like it or not, it contained specific remedies for the border and the workplace. It had a plan for clearing backlogs in legal immigration and managing its future flow. Perhaps most critical, it dealt with the 12 million illegal immigrants already here, through a tough path to earned citizenship.
Unmoored from a comprehensive federal bill, the debate was pushed into the states and is now floating in the La-La Land of the presidential campaign. The Republicans have been battling over the sincerity of their sound bites and trying to make their fixation on one dimension of the problem — tough border and workplace enforcement — sound like the solution.
But it isn’t, of course, because it ignores the fundamental question of what to do about the undocumented 12 million. A locked-down border won’t affect them. There is no way to round them up and move them out all at once. Not even the most eagerly anti-immigration candidate would dare talk about detention camps. Amnesty is a Republican curse word. So what’s the plan?
This is the cavernous hole in anti-immigration policy that its proponents want to cover with chain link and razor wire. It’s where swaggering Republicans get vague and mushy. The emptiness of their position was acutely exposed in the Jan. 5 debate, when Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, ripped into Senator John McCain of Arizona for sponsoring an “amnesty” bill that did not call for the mass expulsion of 12 million people.
MR. McCAIN: There is no special right associated with my plan. I said they should not be in any way rewarded for illegal behavior.
MR. ROMNEY: Are they sent home?
MR. McCAIN: They have to get in line —
MR. ROMNEY: Are they sent home?
MR. McCAIN: — behind everybody else.
MR. ROMNEY: Are they sent home?
MR. McCAIN: Some of them are, some of them are not, depending on their situation.
You’d think that Mr. Romney wanted all illegal immigrants to be sent home. But minutes later, he told the moderator, Charles Gibson of ABC News, something completely different.
MR. GIBSON: Is it practical to take 12 million people and send them out of the country?
MR. ROMNEY: Is it practical? The answer is no. The answer is no.
Mr. Romney (who in the distant past — 2005 — called the McCain bill “reasonable”) stumbled further on a talk show, “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” the next day. He struggled over whether the McCain bill could even be called “amnesty,” since it fined illegal immigrants $5,000.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: So you do believe his plan is amnesty then?
MR. ROMNEY: Not under a legal definition but under the normal, colloquial definition, yes.
Under the normal, colloquial definition, Mr. Romney is talking through his hat. But he isn’t alone. Except for Mr. McCain, the Republican candidates have skirted the issue or, worse, embraced the restrictionist approach known as “attrition.” That amounts to relentlessly tightening the screws in workplaces and homes until illegal immigrants magically, voluntarily disappear.
Making it work would require far more government intrusion into daily lives, with exponential increases in workplace raids and deportations. It would mean constant ID checks for everyone — citizens, too — with immigration police at the federal, state and local levels. It would mean enlisting bureaucrats and snoops to keep an eye on landlords, renters, laborers, loiterers and everyone who uses government services or gets sick.
Worst of all, it’s weak on law and order. It is a free pass to the violent criminals we urgently need to hunt down and deport. Attrition means waiting until we stumble across bad people hiding in the vast illegal immigrant haystack. Comprehensive reform, by bringing the undocumented out of the shadows, shrinks the haystack.
Fred Thompson has been perhaps the most vocal defender of attrition. But on Wednesday, the newly restrictionist Mike Huckabee one-upped him by signing the “No Amnesty” pledge of the nativist group NumbersUSA, formally committing to the principle that all 12 million illegal immigrants must be expelled. Americans, naturally, have no earthly idea how he would accomplish that.
Even if you accept the Republicans’ view of immigration policy as warfare against illegal immigrants, their tactics are the rejects of history, starting with that Vietnam-evoking “attrition.” The border wall is right from Monsieur Maginot’s playbook — fortifying just one of two international borders even though at least 40 percent of illegal immigrants arrive perfectly legally and then overstay their visas.
The attrition fantasy is now, by default, the national immigration strategy. The government is essentially committed to expelling all illegal immigrants, not assimilating them. Instead of bringing its power to bear, Washington has gladly handed the task to a motley collection of state and local governments, each enforcing its own rules, often at cross purposes.
Now, attrition is threatening to become a bipartisan disaster. The SAVE Act, an enforcement-only bill, was introduced last year by a Democrat, Representative Heath Shuler of North Carolina, and the notoriously restrictionist Republicans Brian Bilbray and Tom Tancredo. It is gaining sponsors.
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