THE SABOTAGE of the
AMERICAN BORDERS by PRESIDENT OBAMA to BUILD THE LA RAZA DEM PARTY BASE of
ILLEGALS and DESTROY the GOP WITH AMNESTY for 40 MILLION NEW UNREGISTERED DEMS
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-sabotage-of-american-borders-by.html
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IN LA RAZA OCCUPIED MEXIFORNIA, MORE THAN 2,000 CALIFORNIANS
HAVE BEEN MURDERED BY ILLEGALS THAT FLED
BACK OVER THE BORDER TO AVOID PROSECUTION. ACCORDING TO CA A.G. KAMALA HARRIS,
NEARLY HALF OF ALL MURDERS ARE BY MEXICAN GANGS. ON HER OWN TOP TEN MOST WANTED
CRIMINALS, ALL ARE MEXICANS.
ON THE LIST OF 200 MOST WANTED CRIMINALS IN LOS ANGELES, 176
ARE MEXICANS.
VIVA LA RAZA LOOTING? OBAMA AND HIS LA RAZA INFESTED
ADMINISTRATION ARE DOING IT DAILY!
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75 GANG LEADERS ARRESTED IN LA RAZA INFESTED CA CENTRAL
VALLEY!
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Four in 10
homicides in California are gang-related, Harris said. Those cases also account
for 80% of the state's effort to relocate witnesses whose lives are in danger
because of their cooperation with law enforcement, she said.
*
The
Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
Heather Mac Donald
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Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal
aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the
police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration
status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran
prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such
crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police
officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is
a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry,
it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule
against enforcing immigration law.
The LAPD’s ban on
immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the
country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These
“sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops,
from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.
Such laws testify to
the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that
police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We
can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid
of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly
Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if
I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither
captain would speak for attribution.
But however
pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader
disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty
years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today
the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the
language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal
aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.
It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration
environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien
crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a
police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled
response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off
communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop,
travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto
immunity from the immigration law.
I asked the Miami
Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s
policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran
visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had
the suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking
his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa
overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We
have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,”
explains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant
population.”
Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond
to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is
startling. Some examples:
• In Los Angeles, 95
percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500)
target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants
(17,000) are for illegal aliens.
• A confidential
California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the
20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police
officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang
collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons,
on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations,
and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown
dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived
youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.
• The leadership of
the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the
drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002,
says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican
Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving
time for felonious reentry following deportation.
Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official
crime analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an
injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street
Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those
non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country
by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their
transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how
lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.
Cops and prosecutors
universally know the immigration status of these non-gang “Hollywood dealers,”
as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is assiduously silent
on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer
(known on the street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even
notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed
into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline
for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.
The ordinarily
tough-as-nails former LAPD chief Daryl Gates enacted Special Order 40 in
1979—showing that even the most unapologetic law-and-order cop is no match for
immigration advocates. The order prohibits officers from “initiating police
action where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person”—in
other words, the police may not even ask someone they have arrested about his
immigration status until after they have filed criminal charges, nor may they
arrest someone for immigration violations. They may not notify immigration
authorities about an illegal alien picked up for minor violations. Only if they
have already booked an illegal alien for a felony or for multiple misdemeanors
may they inquire into his status or report him. The bottom line: a cordon
sanitaire between local law enforcement and immigration authorities that
creates a safe haven for illegal criminals.
L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key
1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick
up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major
crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and
robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following
deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers
recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at
court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a
target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after
deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their
first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I
see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the
street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if
the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as
an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the immigration
felony.
Though such a policy
puts the community at risk, the department’s top brass brush off such concerns.
No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just
put them under surveillance for “real” crimes and arrest them for those. But
surveillance is very manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for
getting a violent felon off the street and for questioning him further, it is
absurd to demand that the woefully understaffed LAPD ignore it.
The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they
encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops
without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage
of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few
illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been
any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these
goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of
intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale
could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of
immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose
immigration status police already know.
The real reason
cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and
enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers.
The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified
of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating
violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th
Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered
by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien
membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City
Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have
thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police
commander warned the council: “This is going to open a significant, heated
debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be
afraid,” she declared firmly.
But of course
immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of
gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers
dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes,
but such anxiety can never equal a politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At
the start of the reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued
that allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops
another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to build a
homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he
explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the
police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the
murderer right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.
But six months later,
Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the policy gets us
into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement
issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis
told the L.A. Police Commission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look
at Special Order 40.”
Nor will it ever be,
as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After their brief moment of
truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more adamant in defense
of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart
Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members
from the community, local politicians threw a fit, criticizing district
commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station houses. In turn, the
LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city police
chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies as the
politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see daily
the benefit that an immigration tool would bring.
Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former
mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the
city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could
not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. Oh yeah? said
Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be
grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in court, he
remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked
charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its
employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between
immigrants and government. Six days later, several visa-overstayers
participated in the most devastating attack on the city and the country in
history.
New York conveniently
forgot the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary laws until a gang of five
Mexicans—four of them illegal—abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old mother
of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. The NYPD had already arrested three
of the illegal aliens numerous times for such crimes as assault, attempted
robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses. The
department had never notified the INS.
Citizen outrage
forced Mayor Michael Bloomberg to revisit the city’s sanctuary decree yet
again. In May 2003, Bloomberg tweaked the policy minimally to allow city
staffers to inquire into immigration status only if it is relevant to the
awarding of a government benefit. Though Bloomberg’s new rule said nothing about
reporting immigration violations to federal officials, advocates immediately
claimed that it did allow such reporting, and the ethnic lobbies went
ballistic. “What we’re seeing is the erosion of people’s rights,” thundered
Angelo Falcon of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. After three
months of intense agitation by immigrant groups, Bloomberg replaced this
innocuous “don’t ask” policy with a “don’t tell” rule even broader than
Gotham’s original sanctuary policy. The new rule prohibits city employees from
giving other government officials information not just about immigration status
but about tax payments, sexual orientation, welfare status, and other matters.
But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their
sanctuary policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public
safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle
the overwhelming additional workload.
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, JoaquÃn
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.