EVERY
DAY THERE ARE 12 AMERICANS MURDERED BY ILLEGALS, AND EIGHT CHILDREN MOLESTED.
MEXICAN ARE THE MOST VIOLENT CULTURE IN THE HEMISPHERE. WHEN THEY HOP OUR
BORDERS IT’S AS LOOTERS AND OCCUPIERS.
“I DID NOT HOP THE
BORDER, THE BORDER HOPPED ME.”
“Where ever there is a Mexican, there is Mexico!” Mex President
Calderon, whose country’s biggest exports are: DRUGS, CRIMINALS, POVERTY and
PREGNANT WOMEN.
THERE
HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2,000 AMERICANS MURDERED IN CA BY ILLEGALS THAT FLED BACK
OVER THE BORDER! WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE?
ACCORDING
TO CA ATTORNEY GEN. KAMALA HARRIS DECLARES HALF THE MURDERS IN CA ARE BY
MEXICAN GANGS!!!!!!!!! SHE IS A LA RAZA DEM FOR OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, or at
least continued NON-ENFORCEMENT. CA HAS THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PRISON
SYSTEM IN THE NATION, AND HALF THE INMATE POPULATION ARE MEXICANS!
ANTONIO
“TACO RUNT” VILLARAIGOSA IS A RABIDLY RACIST LA RAZA SUPREMACY. HE WAS ELECTED
BY ILLEGALS! HIS CITY OF LOS ANGELES, NOW IN ECONOMIC MELTDOWN, SPENDS $10
MILLION PER YEAR IN MEXICAN GRAFFITI ABATEMENT ALONE.
OF
THE 12 AMERICANS MURDERED BY ILLEGALS DAILY !!!!! MANY !!!!! ARE MURDERED BY
MEXICANS DRIVING WITHOUT LICENSES, INSURANCE, OR REGISTRATION!!!!!
LA
RAZA SUPREMACIST VILLARAIGOSA’S SOLUTION IS TO ASSURE HIS PEOPLE THEIR CARS
WILL NO LONGER BE IMPOUNDED.
*
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, February 11, 2008
In California, League
of United Latin American Citizens has adopted a resolution to declare
"California Del Norte" a sanctuary zone for immigrants. The
declaration urges the Mexican government to invoke its rights under the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo "to seek third‑nation neutral arbitration of
....disputes concerning immigration laws and their enforcement." We’ll
have the story.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon is in New York today on
the first leg his five‑day tour across America to meddle in immigration issues
in the United States. This is his first visit to the U.S. since he became
President in 2006, but he will not meet with President Bush or any of the
presidential candidates, who he has accused of spewing anti‑immigrant rhetoric.
Join us for that report.
*
PUBLISHED IN 2004. DO
YOU THINK IT’S BETTER NOW? OR IN A STATE OF CRISIS?
These examples of illegal
immigrant crime depict a growing menace to our functioning society. While a
sleepy American public watches idly and a Congress refuses to enforce our
borders while mayors adopt the ‘sanctuary policy’, we citizens receive an average
of 2,200 illegals every 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days per year. Since
the Amnesty policy was announced, the invasion intensifies with greater
numbers.
*
FROM MEX-OWNED NEW YORK
TIMES – PROPAGANDA MACHINE FOR LA RAZA SUPREMACY:
PERHAPS THE ILLEGALS SHOULD TAKE THEIR
HOPES FOR MORE LOOTING BACK TO NARCOMEX! AND TAKE VILLARAIGOSA WITH THEM!
A Change in Police Policy Has Immigrants
Hoping for More
LOS
ANGELES — The weekend checkpoints set up along intersections here were always
meant to catch those who had had too much to drink. In an operation intended to
be equal parts deterrent and enforcement, the police would stop every car,
testing drivers suspected of being under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
But for
years, advocacy groups have complained that the checkpoints unfairly targeted
illegal immigrants, who cannot get driver’s licenses, ensnaring far more
unlicensed drivers than drunken ones. And in March, the Los Angeles Police
Department decided that it would no longer automatically impound the vehicles
of drivers without licenses.
The
change was a significant shift here in the country’s second-largest city, home
to thousands of illegal immigrants who, like many other residents, see driving
as the only viable way to move around a sprawling metropolitan area larger than
Delaware and Rhode Island combined. And it is in marked contrast to debates in
other places around the country where local governments are cracking down
harder on illegal immigrants living within their borders.
The
Police Department here has for years tried to cultivate trust among immigrants,
who often view law enforcement as a threat. The city’s police chief, Charlie
Beck, has repeatedly said that the impound change was an issue of “fairness and
compassion” and that he hoped it would improve the department’s relationship
with immigrants and help persuade more of them to cooperate with police
investigations.
Immigrant
advocacy groups and some political leaders hope that the department’s shift
will encourage other cities to make similar changes — and open the door to the
prospect of granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, an idea Chief
Beck has endorsed.
“It is
good to show some sense of understanding of their plight,” Chief Beck said when
the city’s Police Commission approved the change in March.
But the
new policy faces a legal battle. Last month, the union representing police
officers filed a lawsuit to stop the change, saying that it placed officers at
risk and would make the city’s roads less safe.
“We need
to find a way to be compassionate, yes, but also keep the roads safe,” said
Tyler Izen, president of the union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League. “I’m
not sure the right way for us to deal with this is at the local level.”
The city
attorney’s office assured the Police Department that it had the authority to
change the policy, but the district attorney for Los Angeles County and state
legislative lawyers disagreed, saying it contradicted state law. While the
state’s attorney general was expected to issue an opinion in the coming days,
the matter will most likely be settled in state court.
Under the
new policy, drivers who are pulled over for minor traffic violations, including
speeding, are asked to show valid identification and proof of insurance. If
unlicensed drivers do not have a previous citation, they will not face a 30-day
impound, where fees can often reach into the thousands of dollars (often more
than a car is worth). If a licensed driver is able to come to the scene
immediately, that driver usually will be allowed to take the car. If not, the
car will be towed but can be picked up as soon as the owner comes to retrieve
it with a licensed driver.
“You have
situations where you are pulling someone over and you’ve got a husband pulling
out the baby seat from the car and a wife crying,” said Andrew Smith, a Police
Department spokesman. “For us, that’s a really difficult thing when we want to
show some humanity.”
Several
other California cities have already put similar policies into effect,
including Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose, and a lawmaker representing
Northern California has introduced legislation to create a similar law for the
entire state. But in the vast majority of cities, including the dozens
patrolled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, unlicensed drivers
still face a 30-day impound if they are caught.
Advocates
have their sights set on a more sweeping change — simply allowing anyone to get
a license after passing a driving skills test. Chief Beck has said he favors
such a plan, although he said such licenses should not be identical to a
regular license. The Los Angeles County sheriff, Lee Baca, has also said he
would support a similar idea.
It is
impossible to know precisely how many illegal immigrants drive in California,
but Chief Beck and advocates say that not having a license does little to
discourage them from getting on the road.
“After
all these years, has not providing driver’s licenses ameliorated immigration?” asked
Angelica Salas, the executive director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights
of Los Angeles, which has lobbied for licenses for more than a decade. “The
answer is no. It has only made things more dangerous on the road. We should
just go back to really what was the whole purpose of them in the first place:
to have safety on the roads.”
The
battle to grant licenses to illegal immigrants in California began in the
mid-1990s. State Assemblyman Gil Cedillo of Los Angeles pressed for and got
legislation passed giving illegal immigrants the right to a license in 2004,
but facing a statewide referendum opposing the change, he withdrew it. Now,
with just a few months left in his final term in office, Mr. Cedillo has vowed
to pass the legislation again.
Gov.
Jerry Brown, a Democrat like Mr. Cedillo, has not taken a clear stand on the
issue, although during his 2010 campaign he indicated that he would oppose such
a law, calling it “piecemeal” immigration reform.
But
advocates said they were encouraged by the fact that Mr. Brown had signed other
legislation, including the state’s Dream Act, which
allows all students to received state financial aid for college, regardless of
immigration status.
“Everyone
wants to be skeptical, but I’m as optimistic as I ever have been in the 15
years we’ve been talking about this,” said Daniel Savage, Mr. Cedillo’s chief
of staff. “For us now, this is the most important piece of legislation for the
community.”
*
TWELVE AMERICANS MURDERED EACH DAY BY ILLEGALS
By Joseph Farah
WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON –
While the military "quagmire" in Iraq was said to tip the scales of
power in the U.S. midterm elections, most Americans have no idea more of their
fellow citizens – men, women and children – were murdered this year by illegal
aliens than the combined death toll of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan
since those military campaigns began. Though no federal statistics are kept on
murders or any other crimes committed by illegal aliens, a number of groups
have produced estimates based on data collected from prisons, news reports and
independent research. Twelve Americans
are murdered every day by illegal aliens, according to statistics released by
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. If those numbers are correct, it translates to 4,380
Americans murdered annually by illegal aliens. That's 21,900 since Sept.
11, 2001. Total U.S. troop deaths in Iraq as of last week were reported at
2,863. Total U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan during
the five years of the Afghan campaign are currently at 289, according to the
Department of Defense. But the carnage wrought by illegal alien murderers
represents only a fraction of the pool of blood spilled by American citizens as
a result of an open border and un-enforced immigration laws. While King reports 12 Americans
are murdered daily by illegal aliens, he says 13 are killed by drunk illegal
alien drivers – for another annual death toll of 4,745. That's 23,725 since
Sept. 11, 2001. While no one – in or out of government – tracks all U.S.
accidents caused by illegal aliens, the statistical and anecdotal evidence
suggests many of last year's 42,636 road deaths involved illegal aliens. A
report by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Study found 20 percent of fatal
accidents involve at least one driver who lacks a valid license. In California,
another study showed that those who have never held a valid license are about
five times more likely to be involved in a fatal road accident than licensed
drivers. Statistically, that makes them an even greater danger on the road than
drivers whose licenses have been suspended or revoked – and nearly as dangerous
as drunk drivers. King also reports eight American
children are victims of sexual abuse by illegal aliens every day – a total of
2,920 annually. Based on a one-year in-depth study, Deborah Schurman-Kauflin of
the Violent Crimes Institute of Atlanta estimates there are about 240,000
illegal immigrant sex offenders in the United States who have had an average of
four victims each. She analyzed 1,500
cases from January 1999 through April 2006 that included serial rapes, serial
murders, sexual homicides and child molestation committed by illegal
immigrants. As the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. increases, so does the
number of American victims. According to Edwin Rubenstien, president of ESR
Research Economic Consultants, in Indianapolis in 1980, federal and state
correctional facilities held fewer than 9,000 criminal aliens. But at the end
of 2003, approximately 267,000 illegal aliens were incarcerated in all U.S.
jails and prisons. While the federal government doesn't track illegal alien
murders, illegal alien rapes or illegal alien drunk driving deaths, it has
studied illegal aliens incarcerated in U.S. prisons. In April 2005, the
Government Accountability Office released a report on a study of 55,322 illegal
aliens incarcerated in federal, state, and local facilities during 2003. It
found the following: The 55,322 illegal aliens studied represented a total of
459,614 arrests – some eight arrests per illegal alien; Their arrests
represented a total of about 700,000 criminal offenses – some 13 offenses per
illegal alien; 36 percent had been arrested at least five times before.
"While the vast majority of illegal aliens are decent people who work hard
and are only trying to make a better life for themselves and their families,
(something you or I would probably do if we were in their place), it is also a
fact that a disproportionately high percentage of illegal aliens are criminals
and sexual predators," states Peter Wagner, author of a new report called
"The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration." "That is part of the
dark side of illegal immigration and when we allow the 'good' in we get the
'bad' along with them. The question is, how much 'bad' is acceptable and at
what price?"
*
Woman
involved in accident dies from injuries June 20, 2007
By
Azfamily.com / 3TV
An illegal immigrant has been arrested for
allegedly ramming an unmarked sheriff's deputy's vehicle, causing a collision
that killed a Valley mom.
An
investigation into Tuesday night's accident resulted in Guadalupe
Perez-Borjorquez, 26, being charged with aggravated assault and second-degree
homicide.
Allegedly,
Perez assaulted a sheriff's deputy by repeatedly ramming the deputy's car.
According to
the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, Perez was driving erratically on
eastbound Durango Street near 27th Avenue around 6:30 p.m. Tuesday.
An undercover
narcotics sheriff's detective spotted Perez driving erratically and throwing
beer bottles out of his car.
Detective Rob
Kinnett, a 15-year veteran of the force, alerted law enforcement and continued
to follow Perez.
Investigators
say when Perez saw what he believed to be a police car, he put his 1997 Ford
Taurus into reverse and repeatedly rammed Kinnett's car.
Kinnett stopped
his vehicle and pulled into a nearby parking lot.
Perez proceeded
to move his car behind Kinnett's vehicle and ram it from behind. Then he moved
to the side and rammed Kinnett's car causing, it to go into oncoming traffic.
At this point,
the car collided with a car driven by Nanuma Lavulavu, 46.
The impact of
the crash severed her leg and she died at St. Joseph's Hospital this morning.
*
What
does a SANCTUARY CITY under Mexican occupation look like? A Mexican graffiti
covered dumpster? Tijuana? Graffiti hell hole?..... Yes, it’s called LOS
ANGELES...
And you can thank the racist mayor ANTHONY “THE TACO RUNT”
VILLARAIGOSA.
Sanctuary city Los Angeles is substantially a Mexican
occupied territory. 47% of those that have a job are illegals, overwhelmingly
Mexican. In Los Angeles, so long as you have a stolen social security number,
being unable to speak English is not a problem. You’ll get a job anywhere and
get on welfare easily.
Los Angeles has been characterized by the Christian Science
Monitor as the “MEXICAN GANG CAPITAL OF AMERICA”. Google Los Angeles and
Mexican gangs.
The number of murders by Mexican gangs approaches 1000 per
year. They cost the legals nearly one million each to prosecute. ICE has deported nearly 15,000 convicted
criminal aliens already this year from souther California. One wonders why TACO
RUNT didn’t pardon all of them. They’ve probably voted for him.
1 in 5 births are by illegals. You pay the bills on that,
including 18 years of welfare that comes with it. For the rest of the country
it’s 1 in 10 births that are illegal that the tax payers pay for.
Los Angeles spends millions per year in Mexican graffiti
abatement. One woman that attempted to stop the Mexicans and their spray
painting was shot in the head by an illegal.
*
Public
comments by Mexico’s occupation mayor of Los Angeles, aka “The Taco Runt” FROM
A LIST OF MEXICAN SUPREMACIST RACIST.
9. Antonio Villaraigosa, Chair of MEChA
(student wing of Aztlan movement) at UCLA, former CA assemblymember, former CA
Assembly speaker, currently Los Angeles City Councilman at Southwest Voter
Registration Project Conference in Los Angeles, 6/1997
"Part of today's reality has been
propositions like 187 (to deny public benefits to illegal aliens, 1994),
propositions like 209 (to abolish affirmative action, 1996), the welfare reform
bill, which targeted legal immigrants and targeted us as a community. That's
been the midnight. We know that the sunny side of midnight has been the
election of a Latino speaker ‑ was the election of Loretta Sanchez, against an
arch‑conservative, reactionary hate‑mongering politician like Congressman
Dornan! Today in California in the legislature, we're engaged in a great
debate, where not only were we talking about denying education to the children
of undocumented workers, but now we're talking about whether or not we should
provide prenatal care to undocumented mothers. It's not enough to elect Latino
leadership. If they're supporting legislation that denies the undocumented
driver's licenses, they don't belong in office, friends. They don't belong
here. If they can't stand up and say, 'You know what? I'm not ever going to support
a policy that denies prenatal care to the children of undocumented mothers',
they don't belong here."
*
LA RAZA SUPREMACY IN LOS ANGELES
Over American Crime Victims
By Walter Moore, Candidate For Mayor of Los Angeles,
WalterMooreForMayor.com
On March 2, 2004, the Los Angeles City Council ‑‑ including Villaraigosa, Zine, and Smith ‑‑ voted 15 to 0 to
pass an ordinance (No. 175853) requiring all City agencies to accept Mexico's
"Matricula Consular" cards as valid identification. This phony ID is handed out by Mexico like
grocery store coupons. La Raza donors Bank of America and Wells Fargo both
accept them. There’s big money is the Mexican drug cartel’s fund transfers back
to nacromex.
Repeat: the vote was 15 to ZERO.
The only people who benefit from that ordinance, of course,
are illegal aliens. After all, anyone in the country legally would have valid
identification. The ordinance is part of the City's "sanctuary city"
policy: aiding and abetting illegal immigration by changing our rules to accommodate
illegal aliens.
Fast forward to today, May 8, 2008.
It has been a month since the Shaw family came to City
Council and urged them to pass Jamiel's Law, to spare another family the
heartbreaking burden of a preventable murder.
What action has City Council taken? None. No vote. No
ordinance. Nothing but talk and Zine's watered‑down counterfeit motion, which
would merely "request" that Chief Bratton modify Special Order 40
somewhat. Incredibly, City Council hasn't even had the guts to put that tepid,
toothless motion to a vote. And Bratton has arrogantly declared that he won't
change one word of Special Order 40 in any event.
Nor, of course, has Villaraigosa himself taken any action.
His silence on Jamiel's Law is deafening. He came to Jamiel's funeral for a
"photo op," but he won't come to the aid of Jamiel's family now that
they're trying to spare other families the terrible loss they themselves have
suffered. Villaraigosa could deny "sanctuary city" protection to gang
members with the stroke of a pen. Special Order 40 is a memo, not a law. The
Mayor has to power to amend it or even abolish it by issuing a simple Executive
Directive. He refuses to use that power. He insists on making our city a
sanctuary for gangs.
So we're done with the Mayor and the City Council. Last
night, the Shaws and I signed a formal request for the City Clerk to put
Jamiel's Law on the March 2009 ballot. Today I will FedEx the request to City
Hall. Within a month, we should have petitions ready for L.A.'s voters to sign.
Then you, I and our fellow voters will have 120 days to
gather at least 74,000 L.A. voters' signatures. We will do that, and we will
put Jamiel's Law on the March 3, 2009 ballot.
And on March 3, 2009, we will make
L.A. a sanctuary not for gangs, but for law‑abiding American citizens and legal
aliens. ….unfortunately illegals reelected VILLARAIGOSA and helped him expand
la raza supremacy and the la raza welfare state in los angeles even more!
*
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
States across the country are reversing policies of granting
drivers' licenses to illegal aliens. Oregon and Michigan have already made the
move and other states may soon follow suit.
We'll have a special report.
REPORT ON THE STAGGERING PAY‑OUTS TO ILLEGAL ALIENS ACROSS
THE COUNTRY
And illegal aliens are increasingly reaping welfare benefits
in Los Angeles. They collected $37 million of welfare money and food stamps in
November alone. We’ll report tonight on the
staggering payouts to illegal aliens across the country.
Study Shows 25 Percent Of L.A.'s Welfare Goes To Illegal
Aliens
Supervisor says county spends more than $1 billion a year on
benefits to illegals. According to new data from the Department of Public
Social Services, nearly twenty five percent of Los Angeles County Â’s welfare
and food stamp benefits goes directly to the children of illegal aliens, at a
cost of $36 million a month ‑‑ for a projected annual cost of $432 million.
"The total cost for illegal immigrants to County
taxpayers far exceeds $1 billion a year – not including the millions of
dollars for education," said Antonovich. "With $220 million for
public safety, $400 million for healthcare, and $432 million in welfare
allocations, illegal immigration continues to have a devastating impact on Los
Angeles County taxpayers."
In March, illegals collected over $19 million in welfare
assistance and over $16 million in food stamp allocations.
*
THE WASHINGTON POST
Anchor babies account for roughly 10% of all US births. In
2003, anchor babies accounted for 70% of all births in San Joachim General
Hospital in Stockton, California.
US taxpayers spent an estimated $7.4 Billion in 2003 to
educate illegal immigrants.
34% of students in the Los Angeles school system are illegals
or children of illegals.
Two thirds of Illegal Immigrants adults DO NOT have a high
school degree or equivalent. The illiteracy rate for Illegal Immigrants is 2.5
times higher than that of US Citizens
*
GANG MAYHEM CRIPPLES
BIG AREA OF LOS ANGELES
Thousands stranded,
schools locked down as notorious group battles the LAPD after a drive‑by
killing.
By Richard Winton, Susannah Rosenblatt and Andrew Blankstein
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
February 22, 2008
A drive‑by attack followed by a wild shootout between gang
members and police shut down dozens of blocks of Northeast Los Angeles for
nearly six hours Thursday afternoon, stranding thousands of residents, keeping
students locked in their classrooms and leaving two people dead.
Veteran L.A. Police Department officials described the
bizarre midday shootings ‑‑ and the widespread disruption they caused ‑‑ as
highly unusual even in an area known for gang activity. It left the
neighborhood littered with shell casings and its residents fearful.
Police blamed the incident on the notorious Avenues gang,
which has cast a wide shadow over districts north of downtown L.A. for decades
and continues to be active despite several high‑profile attempts by authorities
to shut it down.
The violence began around noon when a 37‑year‑old man police
described as a bystander was shot more than a dozen times by suspected gang
members as he held the hand of a 2‑year‑old girl. He later died. The toddler,
apparently picked up by a passerby and carried to safety, was not wounded. As
the gunmen drove off, witnesses told police, several pedestrians who apparently
knew the victim opened fire on the car.
Minutes later, police attempted to stop suspects driving in
a white Nissan sedan about 10 blocks away. Three men jumped out of the car, and
at least two of them fired weapons at officers.
A man wielding an AK‑47 rifle was killed by police as they
returned fire, authorities said.
students locked down
at Washington Irving Middle School.
Near the scene of the shootings Thursday, Bratton described
a neighborhood terrorized in recent weeks by gang violence.
"Gangs that have been here for generations have been
going at each other," Bratton said during a news conference, referring to
the Avenues and Cypress Park gangs.
Since the beginning of the year, authorities said Avenues
gang members are suspected in at least six homicides. Northeast Division,
typically far from the most violent in the city, already has eight homicides
this year, more than any other, police said. At that rate, the division would
far eclipse last year's total of 18.
Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz said that while the area has gang
problems, the level of violence in the last few weeks is "unheard
of."
In the last month, police said, about a third of the 60
aggravated assaults in the area this year have been connected to Avenues gang
members.
The Avenues gang has cast a long shadow in these poor,
largely Latino sections north of downtown L.A.
*
LATINO GANG TRIED TO FORCE BLACKS OUT, INDICTMENT SAYS
Criminal rivals and innocent citizens both paid a price in a
South L.A. neighborhood, prosecutors allege.
By Ari B. Bloomekatz and Sam Quinones
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
October 17, 2007
Federal prosecutors Tuesday accused members of a Latino
street gang of a violent campaign to drive African American rivals out of their
South Los Angeles area neighborhood, resulting in at least 20 killings in the
last three years.
Capping an undercover investigation conducted over that
period, authorities issued indictments that charged more than 60 members and
associates of the Florencia 13 street gang with a long list of felonies.
Prosecutors say the gang was trying to dominate the area's drug trade as well
as extort "rent" from prostitutes, vendors, drug dealers and others.
Much of the violence occurred in the Florence‑Firestone
neighborhood, a working‑class unincorporated community of 60,000 north of Watts
that went through a rapid shift in population starting in the 1980s. Once
mostly black, the area is now home to many Mexican immigrants.
Officials said Latino gang leaders in recent years had
sought to drive the remaining black gangs and their supporters from the
neighborhood and had repeatedly ordered members to attack black rivals ‑‑ in
some cases shooting them on sight.
The indictment's description of sustained, deadly racial
gang fighting provides evidence of a type of violence that is often discussed
but seldom documented. Homicide statistics indicate that the vast majority of
killings take place within racial or ethnic groups.
Florence‑Firestone, however, appears to have been a
murderous exception. Killings in the neighborhood peaked in 2005, when 41
homicides sparked widespread community outcry. As violence rose, the L.A.
County Sheriff's Department sent more than 60 additional deputies to the area
and conducted several mass arrests aimed at reducing racial violence. The
district attorney's office devoted a special prosecutor to handle only Florence‑Firestone
homicides for two years.
Last year, homicides plummeted to 19.
Another piece of the stepped‑up law enforcement effort was
the undercover investigation. Officials said Tuesday that they had determined
that 80 shootings since early 2005 had resulted from the gang violence.
In some cases, African Americans with no gang ties were
caught up in the violence, prosecutors said. "In their attempt to
intimidate African Americans in the community, they targeted innocent
citizens," said U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien.
In one instance, an African American couple were robbed at
gunpoint by gang members who were trying to send a message, prosecutors say. In
another, a man waiting at a Florence Avenue bus stop before work was critically
injured in a drive‑by shooting by Florencia members who apparently mistook him
for a rival gang member, according to the indictments.
The gang would "target African American individuals for
assault" and leaders made sure "that all the F13 cliques were
participating in the assaults of African American rival gang members," the
indictments say.
Florence‑Firestone is a collection of factories, stucco
homes and mom‑and‑pop stores that has gone through dramatic demographic changes
every 15 to 20 years since it formed in the early 1930s.
Poor Southern whites, middle‑class blacks and poor Southern
blacks have all entered Southern California via short stays in Florence‑Firestone.
In the late 1980s, the neighborhood was about 80% African
American. But most black residents have moved away. Today, the area is 90%
Latino ‑‑ mostly Mexican immigrants.
"The last five years has been the greatest influx"
of Latinos, said Pastor Chris LeGrande of the Great Hope Fellowship of Faith on
Compton Avenue, one of Florence‑Firestone's largest black churches.
African Americans and Latinos are often separated by
language and culture, and frequently compete for the same jobs. The area has
two parks: Washington Park is used mostly by blacks; Roosevelt Park to the
north by Latinos.
"I think we adults have many problems in sympathizing
with the other race," said Gloria Medina, Spanish‑language liaison for the
Florence‑Firestone Chamber of Commerce. "It's not just the children; it's
that we've taught this to children. . . . [We] respect each other, but there's
not much closeness."
Sheriff Lee Baca said Tuesday that Florencia's violence was
notable given the fact that gang violence in Los Angeles in general has been
dropping in the last few years. In Los Angeles, homicides overall so far this
year are declining to levels not seen since the early 1970s.
Authorities this year have vowed to focus more attention on
race‑motivated crimes involving gangs. The push started after a 14‑year‑old
black girl was shot and killed last year, allegedly by members of a Latino
gang, in the Harbor Gateway section of Los Angeles.
Last year, members of the Latino Avenues gang were convicted
in federal court for a series of assaults and killings in the early 1990s
targeting blacks in Highland Park.
The indictments unveiled Tuesday charged 61 Florencia gang
members and associates with a variety of felonies, including weapons violations,
drug sales and conspiracy to commit murder. More than a dozen of the suspects
were in custody on earlier charges, and 11 defendants are still at large. Many
charges give prosecutors the option to pursue hate‑crime charges once the cases
go to court, which would allow stiffer penalties.
................................
ARTICLE:
THE STAGGERING BURDEN OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION TO TAXPAYERS
Immigration bill sticker shock $127 BILLION (THIS FIGURE IS
DATED. CALIFORNIA ALONE PUTS OUT THIS AMOUNT IN SOCIAL SERVICES TO ILLEGALS IN
AN EFFORT TO KEEP ILLEGALS FLOODING IN AND WAGES DEPRESSED — WAGES ARE
DEPRESSED IN THE U.S. BY $200 BILLION PER YEAR AND THE COST OF SOCIAL SERVICES TO ILLEGALS IS $300 BILLION PER
YEAR AND SOARING.
A government study
puts the cost of the Senate's version of reform at $127 billion over 10 years.
By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian
Science Monitor
WASHINGTON
The price tag for comprehensive immigration reform was not a
key issue when the Senate passed its bill last May. But it is now.
One reason: It took the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) ‑
the gold standard for determining what a bill will cost ‑ until last week to
estimate that federal spending for this vast and complex bill would hit $127
billion over the next 10 years.
At the same time, federal revenues would drop by about $79
billion, according to the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation. If lawmakers
fix a tax glitch, that loss would be cut in half, they add.
In field hearings across the nation this month, House GOP
leaders are zeroing in on the costs of the Senate bill. It's a bid to define
the issue heading into fall elections and muster support for the House bill,
which focuses on border security. They say that the more people know about the
Senate version, including a path to citizenship for some 11 million people now
in the country illegally, the less they will be inclined to support it.
“WE ARE NOW JUST
BEGINNING TO SEE A GLIMPSE OF THE STAGGERING BURDEN ON AMERICAN TAXPAYERS” OF
THE MEXICAN INVASION.......
"We are now just beginning to see a glimpse of the
staggering burden on American taxpayers the Reid‑Kennedy‑McCain immigration
legislation contains," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman James
Sensenbrenner, who convened a field hearing at the State House in Concord,
N.H., Thursday on the costs of the Senate bill.
But business groups and others backing the Senate bill say
that the cost to the US economy of not resolving the status of illegal
immigrants and expanding guest‑worker programs is higher still. "In my
opinion, the fairer question is: How will illegal immigrants impact the costs
of healthcare, local education, and social services without passage of
comprehensive immigration reform?" said John Young, co‑chairman of the
Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, at Thursday's hearing.
"Had we solved this problem in a truly comprehensive
way in 1986 ... we would not have the daily news reporting outright shortages
of farm labor threatening the very existence of agricultural industries coast
to coast," he adds.
Experts are poring over the new CBO data ‑ and coming up
with radically different assessments of the social costs of reform, ranging
from tens of billions of dollars higher to a net wash.
On the issue of border security ‑ a feature in both bills ‑
there is little disagreement. The CBO estimates that the cost of hardening US
borders in the Senate bill is $78.3 billion over 10 years, or about 62 percent
of the bill's total cost.
The fireworks involve new entitlement spending in the Senate
version. The CBO sets the price tag for services for some 16 million new
citizens and guest workers at $48.4 billion through fiscal year 2016. That
includes $24.5 billion for earned income and child tax credits, $11.7 billion
for Medicaid, $5.2 billion for Social Security, $3.7 billion for Medicare, and
$2.4 billion for food stamps.
But it's easier to estimate the cost of a mile of fence than
to assess the prospects for millions of workers, once they can work legally and
claim benefits.
*
“THE AMNESTY ALONE WILL BE THE
LARGEST EXPANSION OF THE WELFARE SYSTEM IN THE LAST 25 YEARS” Heritage Foundation
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
WHY THE NEW JOBS GO TO IMMIGRANTS
By David R. Francis
Wall Street cheered and stock prices rose when the US Labor
Department announced last Friday that employers had expanded their payrolls by
262,000 positions in February.
But it wasn't entirely good news. The statisticians also
indicated that the share of the adult population holding jobs had slipped
slightly from January to 62.3 percent. That's now two full percentage points
below the level in the brief recession that began in March 2001.
Why the apparent contradiction? Reasons abound: population
growth, rising retirements. But one factor that gets little attention is
immigration.
In the past four years, the number of immigrants into the
US, legal and illegal, has closely matched the number of new jobs. That
suggests newcomers have, in effect, snapped up all of the new jobs.
"There has been no net job gain for natives," says
Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University. @
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."
*
The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
Heather Mac Donald EMAIL
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.
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 mmigration felony.
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 ommission: “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. 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 quire 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 ndefinitely. 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 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 11-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.
Heather Mac Donald EMAIL
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.
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 mmigration felony.
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 ommission: “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. 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 quire 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 ndefinitely. 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 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 11-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.
*
Heather
Mac Donald
The Immigrant Gang Plague
Hispanic gang violence is spreading across the country, the sign of a new underclass in the making.
Summer 2004
The Immigrant Gang Plague
Hispanic gang violence is spreading across the country, the sign of a new underclass in the making.
Summer 2004
Before immigration optimists issue
another rosy prognosis for America’s multicultural future, they might visit
Belmont High School in Los Angeles’s overwhelmingly Hispanic, gang-ridden
Rampart district. “Upward and onward” is not a phrase that comes to mind when
speaking to the first- and second-generation immigrant teens milling around the
school this January.
“Most of the people I used to hang out with when I first
came to the school have dropped out,” observes Jackie, a vivacious illegal
alien from Guatemala. “Others got kicked out or got into drugs. Five graduated,
and four home girls got pregnant.”
Certainly, none of the older teens I met outside Belmont was
on track to graduate. Jackie herself flunked ninth grade (“I used to ditch a
lot,” she explains) and never caught up. She is now pursuing a General
Equivalency Diploma—a watered-down certificate for dropouts or expelled
students—in the school’s “adult” division. Vanessa, who sports a tiny horseshoe
protruding from her nostrils, is applying to the adult division, too, having
been kicked out of Belmont at age 18. “I didn’t come to school very often,”
says this American-born child of illegal aliens from El Salvador. Her
boyfriend, Albert, a dashing 19-year-old with long, slicked-back hair, got
expelled for truancy but has talked his way back into the regular high school.
“I have good manipulative skills,” he smiles. After a robbery conviction,
Albert was put on probation but broke every rule in the book: “Curfews, grades,
attendance, missed court days,” he boasts. “But they still let me off the
hook.”
These Belmont teens are no aberration. Hispanic youths,
whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are developing an
underclass culture. (By “Hispanic” here, I mean the population originating in
Latin America—above all, in Mexico—as distinct from America’s much smaller
Puerto Rican and Dominican communities of Caribbean descent, which have
themselves long shown elevated crime and welfare rates.) Hispanic school
dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime
is exploding nationally—rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002—driven by the march
of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome,
underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over
successive generations of Hispanics—they worsen.
Debate has recently heated up over whether Mexican immigration—unique
in its scale and in other important ways—will defeat the American tradition of
assimilation. The rise of underclass behavior among the progeny of Mexicans and
other Central Americans must be part of that debate. There may be assimilation
going on, but a significant portion of it is assimilation downward to the worst
elements of American life. To be sure, most Hispanics are hardworking,
law-abiding residents; they have reclaimed squalid neighborhoods in South
Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. Among the dozens of Hispanic youths I
interviewed, several expressed gratitude for the United States, a sentiment
that would be hard to find among the ordinary run of teenagers. But given the
magnitude of present immigration levels, if only a portion of those from south
of the border goes bad, the costs to society will be enormous.
The Soledad Enrichment Action Charter
School in South Central Los Angeles is at the vortex of L.A.’s gang culture.
Next door to a rose-colored, angel-bedecked church, the boxy school glowers
behind barred gates like those that surround prisons. Soledad’s students, about
half blacks and half Hispanics, have been kicked out of other schools. They
have brought violence with them. In early March, a gunman opened fire on 20
students entering the school at 7:30 am, wounding two. Tensions were high again
as school let out one day this April. A boy had been sent home earlier for
fighting; the question now was, would he return to retaliate? The school’s
probation officer radioed the LAPD’s 77th Division to plead for some officers
to keep watch, without success. As the students, dressed in plain white
T-shirts, filed out to the sidewalk, two burly security guards and a gang
counselor warily eyed the street.
Asked about gangs, the teens proudly reel off their
affiliations: SOK (Still Out Killing); HTO (Hispanics Taking Over); JMC (Just
Mobbing Crazy). A cocky American-born child of Salvadoran parents says that
most of his peers from the eighth grade are “locked up or dead.” “Four are
dead—three were shot, one was run over.” Were you just lucky? I ask. “They were
gangbanging more than me,” says the 17-year-old, who won’t give his name. “I
try to control myself, respect my parents.” That respect only goes so far.
Asked if he’s been in jail, he swaggers: “Yup, for GTA”—grand theft auto. And
he has no intention of leaving his gang: “They’re the homeys, part of the
family.”
Eighteen-year-old Eric, born here to an illegal Mexican and
Guatemalan, is one of the few students I talked to who doesn’t gangbang, though
he is on probation for second-degree robbery, his second conviction. Half his
friends from elementary school are involved in crime, he says. Of course, gang
problems in Los Angeles schools are hardly confined to academies for
delinquents like Soledad. Gang fights in some of L.A.’s regular high schools
draw such crowds that youthful pickpockets have a field day working the
spectators and participants. “People would steal your pagers and cell phones,”
reports one student who has bounced through several schools.
David O’Connell, pastor of the church
next door to Soledad, has been fighting L.A.’s gang culture for over a decade.
He rues the “ferocious stuff” that is currently coming out of Central America,
sounding weary and pessimistic. But “what’s more frightening,” he says, “is the
disengagement from adults.” Hispanic children feel that they have to deal with
problems themselves, apart from their parents, according to O’Connell, and they
“do so in violent ways.” The adults, for their part, start to fear young
people, including their own children.
The pull to a culture of violence among Hispanic children
begins earlier and earlier, O’Connell says. Researchers and youth workers
across the country confirm his observation. In Chicago, gangs start recruiting
kids at age nine, according to criminologists studying policing and social
trends in the Windy City. The Chicago Community Policing Evaluation Consortium
concluded that gangs have become fully integrated into Hispanic youth culture;
even children not in gangs emulate their attitudes, dress, and
self-presentation. The result is a community in thrall. Non-affiliated children
fear traveling into unknown neighborhoods and sometimes drop out of school for
lack of protection. Adults are just as scared. They may know who has been
spray-painting their garage, for example, but won’t tell the police for fear
that their car will be torched in retaliation. “It’s like we’re in our own
little jails that we can’t leave,” said a resident. “There isn’t an uninfested
place nearby.”
Washington, D.C., reports the same “ever-younger”
phenomenon. “Recruitment is starting early in middle school,” says Lori Kaplan,
head of D.C.’s Latin American Youth Center. With early recruitment comes a high
school dropout rate of 50 percent. “Gang culture is gaining more recruits than
our ability to get kids out,” Kaplan laments. “We can get this kid out, but two
or three will take his place.” In May, an 18-year-old member of the Salvadoran
Mara Salvatrucha gang used a machete to chop off four left fingers and nearly
sever the right hand of a 16-year-old South Side Locos rival in the Washington
suburbs.
Ernesto Vega, a 19-year-old Mexican illegal who grew up in
New York City, estimates that most 12- to 14-year-old Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans in New York are in gangs for protection. “If you’re Mexican,
you can’t go to parties by yourself,” he says. “People will ask, ‘Who you down
with? Que barrio?’ They be checkin’ you out. But if it’s 20 of you, and
20 of them, then it’s OK.”
For some children, the choice is: get
beat up once a week, or get beat up once to enter the gang. Others join for the
prestige and sense of belonging. Mario Flores was one of them; he joined Santa
Ana, California’s, Westside Compadres. “When I was 13, I was like, ‘Wow.’ I
wanted them to jump me,” he says in the soft near-whisper of the cool. “They’re
like, ‘You want to get down?’ They got to jumping at you, they go to call you,
‘Trips from Westside Comps’—you feel good.”
Flores (or “Trips”) is a depressing specimen of gang
culture: uneducated and barely articulate. He’s sitting on the other side of a
Plexiglas window in the Santa Ana Central Jail, talking to me over a phone. In
and out of jail with dazzling regularity over the last three years, he most
recently left prison on April 14; on April 21, he was arrested again on a rape
charge. Born in Portland, Oregon, but raised in Mexico, Flores went to live
with cousins in San Bernardino, California, at age 13 and has been traveling
the Southern California gang circuit—Riverside County, Santa Ana, East
L.A.—ever since. Now 20, he is slender and finely chiseled. Gang hand gestures
accompany his speech like hieroglyphics. “When I saw gang members,” he says,
pointing first to his eyes, then outward, “they’re like, ‘Are you down with my
shit?’ ‘I’m down!’ ” I ask if he speaks English or Spanish with his gang. “You
speak Chicano,” he says. “ ‘Hey, homey!’ You mostly talk English, you’ve got
some good words. But the way you talk, you don’t talk good. You don’t talk like
other people.”
Flores expresses the fierce attachment to territory that is
the sine qua non of gang identity. “I was like, ‘I love my neighborhood. If you
don’t love my neighborhood, I’m going to fuck you up.’ ” Charles Beck, captain
of the LAPD’s Rampart Division, marvels at this emotion. “They all come from
identical neighborhoods, identical families, and go to identical schools, and
yet they hate each other with a passion.” The territorial instincts can only be
compared to the Balkans, says Corporal Kevin Ruiz, a Santa Ana gang
investigator. “There’s people who all they do is patrol gang boundaries.
They’re like me, in a way: I’m looking for bad guys; they look for rivals.”
“Trips” showed his love for Santa Ana’s Westside Compadres
by doing “missions”—robbing bars, stealing wallets and cell phones, selling
drugs—to raise money for the gang. “If a big homey told me to fuck someone up,
I had to,” he explains. The gang reciprocated by giving him a place to
stay—when he was bringing in cash. Otherwise he lived in cars or on the street,
sometimes in a hotel.
The chance that Flores will ever become a productive member
of society is slight. Routinely kicked out of high school for fighting, he
lacks rudimentary skills. Like many prisoners, he claims to be reading the
Bible and thanking Jesus, but such prison conversions rarely last. His personal
life is troubled: “My lady, she mad at me”—not surprisingly, given his most
recent rape charge—and Flores is not certain she will be waiting for him when he
gets out of jail. Most likely, Flores will continue contributing to the
Hispanicization of prisons in California: in 1970, Hispanics were 12 percent of
the state’s population and 16 percent of new prison admits; by 1998, they were
30 percent of the California population, and 42 percent of new admits.
Even as it reaches down to
ever-younger recruits, gang culture is growing more lethal. In April,
16-year-old Valentino Arenas drove up to a courthouse in Pomona, California,
and shot to death a randomly chosen California Highway Patrol officer, in the
hope of gaining entry to Pomona’s 12th Street Gang. The assassination wouldn’t
surprise Dennis Farrell, a Nassau County, New York, homicide detective. “We’re
amazed at the openness of shootings,” he says. “When we do cases with Hispanic
gangs, we often get full statements of admission, almost like they don’t see
what’s the big deal.”
The unwritten code that moderated gang violence three or
four decades ago has now fallen away. “When I grew up,” says Santa Ana native
and gang investigator Kevin Ruiz, “there were rules of engagement: no shooting
at churches or at home. Now, no one is immune.” One of Ruiz’s colleagues on the
Santa Ana police force, Mona Ruiz (no relation), spent her adolescence in Santa
Ana gangs; now she tries to get kids out. “Back then,” she says, “if someone
got jumped, you responded with fistfights, not guns. Guns started in the
1980s.” Earlier gangbangers even showed a certain fastidiousness of dress:
“Guys used to iron their jeans for two hours,” Mona Ruiz recalls. “Then they
wouldn’t sit down” to avoid marring the crease. All that changed when heroin
hit, she says.
The constant invasion of illegal aliens is worsening gang
violence as well. In Phoenix, Arizona, and surrounding Maricopa County, illegal
alien gangs, such as Brown Pride and Wetback Power, are growing more volatile
and dangerous, according to Tom Bearup, a former sheriff’s department official
and current candidate for sheriff. Even in prison, where they clash with
American Hispanics, they are creating a more vicious environment.
Upward mobility to the suburbs doesn’t necessarily break the
allure of gang culture. An immigration agent reports that in the middle-class
suburbs of southwest Miami, second- and third-generation Hispanic youths are
perpetrating home invasions, robberies, battery, drug sales, and rape. Kevin
Ruiz knows students at the University of California, Irvine who retain their
gang connections. Prosecutors in formerly crime-free Ventura County,
California, sought an injunction this May against the Colonia Chiques gang
after homicides rocketed up; an affidavit supporting the injunction details how
Chiques members terrorize the local hospital whenever one of the gang arrives
with a gunshot wound. Federal law enforcement officials in Virginia are
tracking with alarm the spread of gang violence from Northern Virginia west
into the Shenandoah Valley and south toward Charlottesville, a trend so
disturbing that they secured federal funds this May to stanch the mayhem. “This
is beyond a regional problem. It is, in fact, a national problem,” said FBI
assistant director Michael Mason, head of the bureau’s Washington field office.
Open-borders apologists dismiss the Hispanic crime threat by
observing that black crime rates are even higher. True, but irrelevant: the
black population is not growing, whereas Hispanic immigration is reaching
virtually every part of the country, sometimes radically changing local
demographics. With a felony arrest rate up to triple that of whites, Hispanics
can dramatically raise community crime levels.
Many cops and youth workers blame the
increase in gang appeal on the disintegration of the Hispanic family. The
trends are worsening, especially for U.S.-born Hispanics. In California, 67
percent of children of U.S.-born Hispanic parents lived in an intact family in
1990; by 1999, that number had dropped to 56 percent. The percentage of
Hispanic children living with a single mother in California rose from 18
percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 1999. Nationally, single-parent households
constituted 25 percent of all Hispanic households with minor children in 1980;
by 2000, the proportion had jumped to 34 percent.
The trends in teen parenthood—the marker of underclass
behavior—will almost certainly affect the crime and gang rate. Hispanics now
outrank blacks for teen births; Mexican teens have higher birthrates than
Puerto Ricans, previously the most “ghettoized” Hispanic subgroup in terms of
welfare use and out-of-wedlock child-rearing. In 2002, there were 83.4 births
per 1,000 Hispanic females between ages 15 and 19, compared with 66.6 among
blacks, 28.5 among non-Hispanic whites, and 18.3 among Asians. Perhaps these
young Hispanic mothers are giving birth as wives? Unlikely. In California,
where Latina teens have the highest birthrate of teens in any state, 79 percent
of teen births to U.S.-born Latinas in 1999 were to unmarried girls.
According to the many young Hispanics I spoke to, more and
more girls are getting pregnant. “This year was the worst for pregnancies,”
says Liliana, an American-born senior at Manual Arts High School near downtown
Los Angeles. “A lot of girls get abortions; some drop out.” Are girls ashamed
when they get pregnant? I wonder. “Not at all,” Liliana responds. Among
Hispanic teens, at least, if not among their parents, the stigma of single
parenthood has vanished. I asked Jackie, the Guatemalan GED student at L.A.’s
Belmont High, if her pregnant friends subsequently got married. She guffawed.
George, an 18-year-old of Salvadoran background who was kicked out of Manual
Arts six months ago for a vicious fight, estimates that most girls at the
school are having sex by age 16.
Mexican and Central American
immigration to New York City is of much more recent vintage than in California,
but young Mexicans in New York have quickly assimilated to underclass sexual
behavior. Nineteen-year-old Ernesto Vega reports that his oldest sister dropped
out of school at 17 and got pregnant the next year. “I heard her boyfriend came
from Mexico to work, but he wasn’t working. He was on the street.” Ernesto
says. Then the boyfriend got arrested, probably on drug charges. “He says he
was arrested for doing nothing, but they don’t arrest you for doing nothing.”
Ernesto knows three or four Mexican-American girls with
babies, including a 16-year-old with two daughters. “Another just got pregnant
this year,” he says. “She’s 15.” None is married. None has a GED or will go to
college. As for the fathers of their children? “The boys be leaving the girls
alone,” Vega says. “The boy goes away.”
Some Hispanic parents valiantly try to impose old-fashioned
consequences on teen pregnancies, but they are losing the battle. Vega’s
father, a building superintendent and hardware store clerk, angrily told his
pregnant daughter, according to Vega: “You gotta go live with [the boyfriend].
I now want nothing to do with you!” The boyfriend offered to take the girl into
the apartment he was sharing with a female acquaintance, but she wanted her own
place. Eventually, she persuaded her father to take her back, but only on the
condition that she work. She now sells Yankee paraphernalia on the Grand
Concourse in the Bronx.
Traditional and contemporary family values continued to
clash throughout the pregnancy. Although the boyfriend vanished until the
birth, he showed up at Vega’s house with his whole family when the girl
returned from the hospital with her newborn. “He took his three sisters and his
mother; one sister took the nephews.” Vega recalls. The boyfriend’s demand: you
have to decide where to live. The girl told him to take a hike. The family
delegation, Vega judges, already adapting to American individualist norms, was
inappropriate. “The problem was not with the families,” he says, “but between
him and her.”
In one respect, Central American immigrants break the mold
of traditional American underclass behavior: they work. Even so, Mexican
welfare receipt is twice as high as that of natives, in large part because
Mexican-American incomes are so low, and remain low over successive generations.
Disturbingly, welfare use actually rises between the second and third
generation—to 31 percent of all third-generation Mexican-American households.
Illegal Hispanics make liberal use of welfare, too, by putting their
American-born children on public assistance: in Orange County, California,
nearly twice as many Hispanic welfare cases are for children of illegal aliens
as for legal families.
More troublingly, some Hispanics combine work with
gangbanging. Gang detectives in Long Island’s Suffolk County know when members
of the violent Salvadoran MS-13 gang get off work from their lawn-maintenance
or pizzeria jobs, and can follow them to their gang meetings. Mexican gang
members in rural Pennsylvania, which saw two gang homicides in late April, also
often work in landscaping and construction.
On the final component of underclass
behavior—school failure—Hispanics are in a class by themselves. No other group
drops out in greater numbers. In Los Angeles, only 48 percent of Hispanic
ninth-graders graduate, compared with a 56 percent citywide graduation rate and
a 70 percent nationwide rate. In 2000, nearly 30 percent of Hispanics between
the ages of 16 and 24 were high school dropouts nationwide, compared with about
13 percent of blacks and about 7 percent of whites.
The constant inflow of barely literate recent Mexican
arrivals unquestionably brings down Hispanic education levels. But later
American-born generations don’t brighten the picture much. While
Mexican-Americans make significant education gains between the first and second
generation, adding 3.5 years of schooling, progress stalls in the next
generation, economists Jeffrey Grogger and Stephen Trejo have found.
Third-generation Mexican-Americans remain three times as likely to drop out of
high school than whites and one and a half times as likely to drop out as
blacks. They complete college at one-third the rate of whites.
Mexican-Americans are assimilating not to the national schooling average,
observed the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas this June, but to the dramatically
lower “Hispanic average.” In educational outcomes, concluded the bank,
“Ethnicity matters.”
No one knows why this is so. Every parent I spoke to said
that she wanted her children to do well in school and go to college. Yet the
message is often not getting across. “Hispanic parents are the kind of parents
that leave it to others,” explains an unwed Salvadoran welfare mother in Santa
Ana. “We don’t get that involved.” A news director of a Southern California
Spanish radio station expresses frustration at the passivity toward education
and upward mobility he sees in his own family. “I tried to knock the
‘Spanglish’ accent out of my niece and get rid of that crap,” he says. “But the
mother was completely nihilistic about her child. It’s going to take direct
action from Americans to Americanize Hispanics.”
Perhaps the answer to the disconnect between stated parental
goals and educational outcomes lies in Hispanic culture’s traditional suspicion
of education. Santa Ana police officer Mona Ruiz recounts a joke told by
comedian George Lopez: “When a white person graduates, people say, ‘You did good.’
When a Mexican graduates, people say, ‘You think you’re better than us.’ ” The
lure of an immediate income often proves more compelling than a four- to
eight-year investment in self-improvement. New Yorker Ernesto Vega says he
knows “Mexicans with papers” who drop out of high school. “They young. They
say, ‘I’m going to start working, I don’t need school.’ ” But Vega has no
illusions about the consequences: “Even with papers, you’re only making $300 a
week as a delivery boy in restaurants, because you don’t know anything else.”
Proponents of unregulated immigration
simply ignore the growing underclass problem among later generations of
Hispanics, with its attendant gang involvement and teen pregnancy. When
pressed, open-borders advocates dismiss worries about the Hispanic future with
their favorite comparison between Mexicans and Italians. Popularized by
political analyst Michael Barone in The New Americans, the analogy goes
like this: a century ago, Italian immigrants anticipated the Mexican influx,
above all in their disregard for education. They dropped out of school in high
numbers—yet they eventually prospered and joined the mainstream. Therefore,
argue Barone and others, Mexicans will, too.
But the analogy is flawed. To begin with, the magnitude of Mexican
immigration renders all historical comparisons irrelevant, as Harvard historian
Samuel Huntington argues in his latest book, Who Are We?. In 2000,
Mexicans constituted nearly 30 percent of the foreign-born population in the
U.S.; the next two largest groups were the Chinese (5 percent) and Filipinos (4
percent). By contrast, at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest
immigrant group, Germans, made up only 15 percent of the foreign-born
population. In 1910, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Italy, in that order,
sent the most migrants to the U.S.; Italians made up only 17 percent of the
combined total. English-speakers made up over half the new arrivals; there was
no chance that Italian would become the dominant language in any part of the country.
By contrast, half of today’s immigrants speak Spanish.
Equally important, the flow of newcomers came to an abrupt
halt after World War I and did not resume until 1965. This long pause allowed
the country ample opportunity to Americanize the foreign-born and their
children. Today, no end is in sight to the migration from Mexico and its
neighbors, which continually reinforces Mexican culture in American Hispanic
communities and seems likely to do so for decades into the future.
Contemporary Hispanic immigration
also differs from the classic Ellis Island model in that the ease of
cross-border travel and communication allows Mexican and Central American
immigrants to keep at least one foot planted in their native land. Meanwhile,
the Mexican government does everything it can to bind Mexican migrants
psychologically to the home country, in order to safeguard the annual $12
billion flow of remittances. It encourages dual nationality, and Mexicans in
the U.S. can now run for office in Mexico. A Yolo County, California, tomato
farmer has already been elected mayor of Jerez. Not surprisingly, Mexicans and
other Central Americans have the lowest rates of naturalization of all
immigrants—less than 30 percent in 1990, compared with two-thirds of qualified
immigrants from major European sending countries, the Philippines, and Hong
Kong.
Even Mexico’s former foreign minister, Jorge Castaneda,
acknowledges the unprecedented character of Hispanic immigration. “Mexican
immigration,” he wrote recently, “does have distinctive traits that do make
[assimilation] difficult, if not impossible. This is . . . a matter of
history.” That “history” holds that the U.S. robbed Mexico of its natural
territory in the nineteenth century, as some Mexican immigrants never seem to
forget. “It’s kind of scary,” says Santa Ana gang intervention officer Mona
Ruiz. “I hear, ‘I was here first; this used to be Mexico. You stole it from
us.’ ” Mexican-American Ruiz is herself called a “traitor” for becoming
Americanized.
While proponents of the “reconquista” of “Alta California”
(as Mexican nationalists call the lost territory) are a small minority of
Hispanic immigrants, a much larger proportion hold on to their Hispanic
identities. Few of the American-born students I spoke to in Southern California
identified themselves as “American.” Many said they were “Mexican,” “Latino,”
or “Mexican-American”—usages encouraged by the multicultural dogma in the
schools, a far cry from the Americanization efforts of classrooms a century
ago.
Michael Barone’s Italian-Mexican
comparison also ignores the differences between the U.S. economies of 1904 and
2004. While Italian dropouts in 1904 could make their way into the middle class
by working in the booming manufacturing sector or plying their existing
craftsman skills, that is far more difficult today, given the decline of
factory jobs and the rise of the knowledge-based economy. As the limited
education of Mexican-Americans depresses their wages, their sense of being
stuck in an economic backwater breeds resentment. “The second generation
becomes angry with America, as they see their fathers faltering,” observes
Cesar Barrios, an outreach worker for the Tepeyac Association, a social
services agency for Mexicans in New York City. This resentment only increases
the lure of underclass culture, with its rebellious rejection of conventional
norms, according to Barrios. For this reason, he says, many young Mexicans
“prefer to imitate blacks than white people.”
The Spanish-language media, which reaches two-thirds of all
Hispanics, reinforces the sense of grievance. Stories about America’s cruelties
to immigrants and the country’s shocking failure to legalize illegal aliens
dominate news coverage. A billboard for Los Angeles’s Spanish newspaper La
Opinión conveys the usual tone: “Justice,” “Abuse,” “Deportation,” and
other hot-button topics blare out in massive lettering.
Chicago provides a cautionary tale about high levels of
Hispanic immigration combined with an ever more powerful underclass ethic.
During the 1990s, the Hispanic population in Chicago grew 38 percent, to
754,000, and became increasingly concentrated in the city’s barrios. Education
levels and fluency in English dropped lower and lower, while serious crime,
social disorder, and physical decay grew in direct proportion to the number of
Spanish-speaking Latinos. After a neighborhood became more than 60 percent
Latino, physical decay—including graffiti, trash-filled vacant lots, and
abandoned cars—jumped disproportionately. By 2001, social pathology among
Spanish-speaking Latinos was higher than for any other racial or ethnic group.
There are many counterexamples that
show a salutary effect of Hispanic immigration. Santa Ana, California, at 76
percent Latino the most heavily Spanish-speaking city of its size in the
country, has cleaned up the seedy bars from its downtown area and replaced them
with palm trees and benches, in large part thanks to a newly created business
improvement district. Many homes in Santa Ana’s wealthier Mexican neighborhoods
sport exuberant roses and bougainvillea in their front yards, and students I
spoke to there wanted to become lawyers, architects, and medical technicians.
In predominantly Mexican East Los Angeles, housing prices are soaring along
with the rest of the Southern California housing market: a 1928 two-bedroom,
one-bath bungalow with a lawn gone to seed was listed at $265,000 this April.
And in increasingly Hispanic South Central L.A., tiny bodegas selling milk,
diapers, and piñatas are replacing liquor stores.
Yet a seemingly innocuous block in Santa Ana can host five
to eight households dedicated to gangbanging or drug sales. A front yard may be
relatively trash-free; inside the house, a different matter entirely, says
Santa Ana cop Kevin Ruiz. “I’ve been to three houses just this week where they
made a mountain of trash in the backyard or changed their baby’s diaper by
throwing it over the couch. They don’t use the indoor plumbing, while letting
their dogs go to the bathroom on the carpet.” Ruiz drives by the modest tract
home where his Mexican father, who worked in Orange County’s farming industry,
raised him in the 1950s. A car with a shattered windshield, a trailer, and
minivan sit in the backyard, surrounded by piles of junk and a mattress leaning
on the garage door. “My mom taught us that even if you’re poor, you should be
neat,” he says, shaking his head. Fifty-year-old men are still dressing like chollos
(Chicano gangsters), Ruiz says, and fathers are ordering barbers to shave their
young sons bald in good gang tradition.
Without prompting, Ruiz brings up the million-dollar
question: “I don’t see assimilation,” he says. “They want to hold on [to
Hispanic culture].” Ruiz thinks that today’s Mexican immigrant is a “totally
different kind of person” from the past. Some come with a chip on their
shoulder toward the United States, he says, which they blame for the political
and economic failure of their home countries. Rather than aggressively seizing
the opportunities available to them, especially in education, they have learned
to play the victim card, he thinks. Ruiz advocates a much more aggressive
approach. “We need to explain, ‘We’ll help you assimilate up to a certain
point, but then you have to take advantage of what’s here.’ ”
Ruiz’s observations will strike anyone who has hired eager
Mexican and Central American workers as incredible. I pressed him repeatedly,
insisting that Americans see Mexican immigrants as cheerful and hardworking,
but he was adamant. “We’re creating an underclass,” he maintained.
Immigration optimists, ever ready to trumpet the benefits of
today’s immigration wave, have refused to acknowledge its costs. Foremost among
them are skyrocketing gang crime and an expanding underclass. Until the country
figures out how to reduce these costs, maintaining the current open-borders
regime is folly. We should enforce our immigration laws and select immigrants
on skills and likely upward mobility, not success in sneaking across the
border.
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