Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal
aliens.
PART TWO
The chronic shortage of
manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they await their deportation
hearings (or, following an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual
deportation) has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the
feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the
country illegally through stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of
illegal aliens who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been
convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who have
been deported following conviction for an aggravated felony and who have reentered (an
offense punishable with 20 years in jail).
That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike Cutler, who
worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s, explains. “If you
arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding
war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks, threw a couple
of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to another agent: 'Next!
Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed over an old lady, and had a gun.' ”
But such one-upmanship was usually fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains
Cutler, “it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear and let
them go.”
But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a judge issues a
final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and appeals), they rarely have
the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second
alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early
1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately
85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual
response to final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a
notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or two to be deported,
when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable
aliens who received run letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94
percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring countries.
To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete
indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens rape by
illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the city’s
failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the ground that the
agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time again been unable
to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last February. “When we reach
them on the phone, they require that we write a letter. When we write a letter, they
require that it be by a superior.”
Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a former NYPD
homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals in
Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to threaten an
illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he
cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the INS would never show up. The
message could not be clearer: this is a culture that can’t enforce its most basic law
of entry. If policing’s broken-windows theory is correct, the failure to enforce one
set of rules breeds overall contempt for the law.
The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that would allow
immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a criminal was still in state
or federal prison, so that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking
up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately bogged down
due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were
foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an
army of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in contesting deportation)
and so would have to request delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be
available. In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born
inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of
their deportability. They included 1,198 aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon
re-arrested for new crimes.
Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a creature of
immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great pressure from local
politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of such “benefits” as
permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away from criminal or other
investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS refused to join an FBI task force
against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami, fearing criticism for
“Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists protested a much-publicized
raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the Border Patrol said that it would no longer
join Simi Valley, California, probation officers on home searches of
illegal-alien-dominated gangs.
The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics driving the
INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early 1990s, the
prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to
preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a political bonanza
in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization
process radically expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing
errors in 1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of
thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed robbery, were
naturalized.
Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from Congress
an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can keep them in the
country indefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn are supervising two
illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship—who look “ready
to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a probation official, but the
officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen Social
Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells phone cards, which he uses himself to make
untraceable calls. The Saudi’s offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to
get employment—a puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the
Middle East, including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to
terrorism, so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently,
he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would not be
prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist intentions, used whatever it
had to put him in prison.
Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but the two
ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their deportation. “Due
process allows you to stay for years without an adjudication,” says a probation
officer in frustration. “A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the country
for three years, a high-priced one for ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation
officials are watching the bridges.
Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens, the reality,
says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come back. They can’t
make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal farmworkers and dishwashers who
overpower U.S. border controls every year carry in their wake thousands of brutal
assailants and terrorists who use the same smuggling industry and who benefit from the
same irresistible odds: there are so many more of them than the Border Patrol.
For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part and
parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS had as much
effect on the migration of millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And
the immigrants themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in
the shadows, seemed to regard immigration authorities with all the concern of an elephant
for a flea.
Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of illegal
day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in front of money wire
services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering
to the local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There
is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like the
dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping that an SUV
seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t worry, because
we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the papers, but
here, nobody asks you for papers.”
Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government really tries to
prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor inconvenience to the day laborers. The
odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter,
crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them,
but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings,
you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the coyotes will
abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into New York from Los
Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her across the border. “Because
I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.
The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals and
terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably
militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can
easily get work, they will find ways to evade border controls. But enforcing laws against
illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents
nationwide were trying to find and prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and
millions of illegal aliens who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.
Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite investigations,
not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak. That’s no accident:
though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business
lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form of work
authorization necessary to enforce that ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such
proposals as a toll-free number to the Social Security Administration for employers to
confirm Social Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers
verify work eligibility would result in discrimination against Hispanics—implicitly
conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work illegally.
The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a charade.
Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers
pretend to believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker
is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not patently
phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will nearly
always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer
guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities must prove
that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost insurmountable burden. Meanwhile,
the market for counterfeit documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration
authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant
workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.
For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment charade. If
immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide investigation—which
will at least net the illegal employees, if not the employers—local congressmen will
almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia
was not only aborted by Georgia’s congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a
local amnesty for the growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the
spirit of the employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups
are ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers understandably
fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.
Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture that the
continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is the breakdown of the
distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free
public education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer them
driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant illegal aliens college
scholarships and reduced in-state tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement
agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to
credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its
blessing to this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns
that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make it a boon to money
launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an
Iranian man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.
Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an illegal
resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of irrational bigotry.
Arrests of illegal aliens inside the border now inevitably spark protests, often led by
the Mexican government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.”
Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal to an authority
higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the term “amnesty” for
implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman
Luis Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and
you need to be forgiven.”
Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S. owes them,
not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids to
school,” said California assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that
people he stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce
the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, Joaquín Avila, a UCLA
Chicano studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote,
especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of
apartheid.
Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the reverse. By a
huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in immigration, and they
endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago: Americans “are
fed up with efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of
any people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which
they and their posterity will live.” But if the elites’ and the advocates’
idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be
surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people
outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.
However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent
immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should expel
illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting non-criminal illegal
immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies. By stripping cops of what may
be their only immediate tool to remove felons from the community, these policies leave
law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.
But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more destructive
effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping
assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the
police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school has its
Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega,
an illegal 18-year-old Mexican. Such pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that
immigrants learn about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it.
“Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people that anything
goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of
Radio Nueva Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela
of social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.
For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide what
our immigration policy is...and enforce it.
The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave by Heather Mac Donald |
