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Amnesty In Disguise
Posted 08/10/2010 06:51 PM ET
Border: After suing Arizona to assert federal supremacy over states on immigration, it turns out that ICE, Washington's immigration cop on the beat, isn't enforcing the law at all. This is amnesty by another name.
Oh, what a hullabaloo the Justice Department made last month over Arizona's SB 1070, arguing before a federal district judge that the law must be struck down because the federal government has "pre-eminent authority to regulate immigration matters."
Arizona's effort was depicted as some sort of secessionist usurpation of federal prerogatives, despite the fact that SB 1070 mirrored federal law.
Incredibly, Judge Susan Bolton, an appointee of President Clinton, agreed and issued an injunction on those grounds.
In practical terms, her decision means that Arizona's 15,000 lawmen could not help federal agents enforce the law on America's largest and most dangerous immigrant-smuggling corridor.
Now it's obvious why: The Justice Department isn't interested in enforcing the law.
Last week, 259 representatives of the union that represents 7,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents handed down a unanimous vote of "no confidence" in ICE leaders, whose policies keep them from doing their job.
Based on those policies, agents can no longer arrest illegal immigrants even if they announce their status on a sandwich board.
According to a June 29 memo from ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton, ICE must now "prioritize the apprehension and removal of aliens who only pose a threat to national security and/or public safety, such as criminals and terrorists."
Given that all police agencies look for such targets, such a premise is absurd. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, after all, was arrested by a traffic cop, not a fancy anti-terror strike force, in 1995.
And aside from wondering why terrorists are being released at all across a border they'll have no trouble recrossing, Morton's policy effectively means no one is looking for illegal immigrants once they make it past the Border Patrol.
This is taking pick-and-choose law enforcement to an extreme and runs counter to best police practices, such as James Q. Wilson's "broken window" theory of criminology. This holds that enforcement against minor crimes in an area helps prevent an escalation into more serious crime.
ICE's Morton claims the agency has limited resources, so it can deport only 400,000 illegal immigrants a year. From a government agency with a $2.6 billion detention and removal budget, that comes to about $6,500 per deportee, a de facto statement of government inefficiency and waste. And it affects only 4% of all illegal border-crossers.
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Heather Mac Donald: White House doesn't want to enforce immigration
By: Heather Mac Donald
OpEd Contributor
August 4, 2010
The real motivation for the Justice Department's lawsuit against Arizona's new immigration statute was the only one not mentioned in the department's brief: The Obama administration has no intention of enforcing the immigration laws against the majority of illegal aliens already in the country.
It is that policy alone which conflicts with SB 1070: Arizona wants to enforce the law; the Obama administration does not. Reasonable minds can differ on whether that conflict puts Arizona in violation of the Constitution's Supremacy Clause.
But what is indisputable is that the failure of the federal government to openly acknowledge the real ground for its opposition to SB 1070 has rendered incoherent not just its own public arguments against the law, but the judicial ruling which largely rubber stamps those arguments as well.
The Arizona statute affirms the power of a local police officer or sheriff's deputy to inquire into someone's immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally, and if doing so is practicable. Under SB 1070, such an inquiry may occur only during a lawful stop to investigate a non-immigration offense.
Both the Justice Department and U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, in striking down most of SB 1070, couched their opposition to the statute exclusively in terms of its effect on legal, as opposed to illegal, aliens. SB 1070, Judge Bolton wrote, would impermissibly burden legal immigrants already in the country by subjecting them to unwarranted immigration checks.
There are two problems with this line of argument: First, it ignores the fact that Congress has already anticipated and approved precisely the sort of local immigration inquiries that Judge Bolton now finds unconstitutional. Second, the argument would make all immigration enforcement impossible.
In 1996, Congress banned so-called sanctuary policies, by which cities and states prohibit their employees from working with federal immigration authorities regarding illegal aliens. It was in the federal interest, Congress declared, that local and federal authorities cooperate in the "apprehension, detention or removal of [illegal] aliens."
In pursuance of that mandate, the federal government operates an immigration clearinghouse, the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC), to provide just the sort of immigration-status information to local and state law-enforcement officials that SB 1070 seeks.
It is therefore absurd to now claim, as Judge Bolton and the Obama Administration do, that such local inquiries conflict with the federal immigration scheme. It is even more absurd to argue that the risk that a legal alien will be questioned about his immigration status makes the alleged conflict unconstitutional.
Any immigration enforcement carries the possibility that a legal alien or U.S. citizen will be stopped and questioned. The only way to guarantee that legal aliens are never asked to present their immigration papers is to suspend immigration enforcement entirely. (The same possibility of stopping innocent people for questioning applies to law enforcement generally; that possibility has never been held to invalidate the police investigative power.)
If Congress intended to create such a blanket ban on asking legal aliens for proof of legal residency, it could have revoked the 1952 law requiring aliens to carry their certificate of alien registration. Such a requirement makes sense only on the assumption that legal aliens will upon occasion be asked to prove their legal status.
Such unpersuasive reasoning suggests that something else is going on. That something is the fact that SB 1070 would have put the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of repeatedly telling Arizona's law enforcement officers that it is not interested in detaining or deporting the illegal aliens that they have encountered in the course of their duties; the law, in other words, would have exposed the administration's de facto amnesty policy.
And SB 1070 would have shown that immigration-law enforcement can work simply by creating a deterrent to illegal entry and presence. Even before it went into operation, the Arizona law was already inducing illegal aliens to leave the state, according to news reports.
Illegal aliens are virtually absent from the Justice Department's brief or from Judge Bolton's opinion. Despite this studied avoidance, it's time to have a public debate about how much immigration enforcement this country wants and which enforcement policies--the administration's or Arizona's -- best represent the public will.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and co-author of The
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/White-House-doesn_t-want-to-enforce-immigration-1007060-99891419.html#ixzz0w8gI2nha
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THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
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