Illegal
Immigration and Crime
By
James R. Edwards, Jr.
Posted
November 22, 2004 (FIGURES ARE VERY DATED)
Immigrant
criminality represents perhaps the worst abuse of the liberty aliens enjoy in
the United States. Increasingly, the government closest to the people either
finds its hands tied or cravenly abrogates its responsibility to fellow
Americans within its jurisdiction. Moreover, the illegal element exacerbates
the economic and other burdens caused by legal immigration.
The
current high rate of sustained, mass immigration—more than one million legal
immigrants plus half a million illegal aliens every year—forces many states and
localities into turmoil. The illegals certainly live outside the obligations
that those who live under the "consent of the governed" owe to each
other: While the principles of the Declaration of Independence guarantee all
human beings certain natural and unalienable rights, only parties who have
consented to our government deserve the full rights of citizenship. Illegal
immigrants are not part of the social contract giving legitimacy to this
government. American citizens have not given their consent to higher taxes,
crowded schools, jammed emergency rooms, clogged roads, unlawful turning of
single-family homes into hotels or apartments into tenements, forced
multicultural amenities such as bilingual education and multilingual ballots,
or welfare and other services subsidizing poverty-prone immigrants. Above all,
they never consented to higher crime rates.
While
anyone who decries illegal immigration is required to distinguish it from legal
immigration, the effects of legal immigration should first be noted. Robert
Samuelson recently wrote in his Washington Post column that "Hispanics
account for most of the increase in poverty" since 1990. "Compared
with 1990, there were actually 700,000 fewer non-Hispanic whites in poverty
last year . . . . Meanwhile, the number of poor Hispanics is up by 3 million
since 1990. The health insurance story is similar. Last year 13 million
Hispanics lacked insurance. They're 60 percent of the rise since 1990."
And of course a growing proportion of the Hispanic population is immigrants
poorer than their predecessors. Samuelson remarks that the black poverty rate
in this period has actually dropped, from 32 to 24 percent.
The
NAS report also said fiscal impacts tend to benefit the federal government and
drain state and local government resources. "Much like anyone else in the
population, immigrants use services that are costly to provide, or that others
can use less freely—so-called congestion costs. Examples include services from
roads, sewers, police and fire departments, libraries, airports, and foreign
embassies." Therefore, having a much larger immigrant population (29
percent of the U.S. foreign-born, a fourth of the State's population) bloats California's
budget significantly.
The
Florida legislature rejected a bill issuing driver's licenses to illegal
aliens. Kansas state legislators voted to give illegal aliens instate college
tuition. Alabama and Florida state police work closely with federal immigration
enforcers. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago have "sanctuary"
policies that keep city employees, even police, from asking about immigration
status. An Idaho county commissioner billed Mexico for the $2 million illegal
aliens owe for county services.
The
impact is seen particularly in crime: Record-high auto thefts in Arizona, drug
trafficking in Salt Lake City, human smuggling rings in Los Angeles, D.C.
sniper Lee Malvo, money laundering, prostitution, gang murders, and even
slavery. Immigration authorities estimate that 84,000 state inmates are aliens,
though state and local figures on foreign-born prisoners are hard to come by.
At least three quarters of these immigrant state inmates are in Arizona,
California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas—the top
immigrant destinations.
Figures
for 1999 State Criminal Alien Assistance Program compensation show claims of
$1.5 billion in documented costs incurred by state corrections and local jails
for covered aliens. County governments face a special burden, a 2001 report by
24 Southwestern border counties calculated. They spent, from general funds,
$894 million on law enforcement and criminal justice in fiscal year 1999. Many
of the costs that criminal aliens impose on all state, county, and municipal
jurisdictions are not represented in such figures. To cite just one California
example, San Diego now spends $50 million a year to handle illegal criminal
aliens.
The
underworld network built up by millions of alien lawbreakers, who by and large
have no fear of capture or of being held accountable, enabled the September 11
terrorists to operate undetected. Latino illegal aliens in Northern Virginia
helpfully showed several of the terrorists the ropes on how to secure Virginia
driver's licenses fraudulently.
The
advancement of "political correctness" and multiculturalism has
caused politicians to be less willing to challenge limitations on their authority
over resources. Local and state politicians in heavy immigrant-receiving areas
have instead expanded immigrant eligibility for public benefits, welfare,
assistance programs, health care programs for those without private insurance,
and driver's and other licenses. Some states and localities have begun to
accept the Mexican matricula consular ID card, though it has been determined to
pose a great risk to U.S. national security. Even before the recently reported
crossing of 25 Chechens into Arizona, authorities knew that the illegal aliens
pose a national security problem.
Dealing with current
levels and quality of legal immigration is an immense problem by itself. But it
is clear that until alien criminality of every kind is punished, swiftly and
surely,
Americans who must live with the consequences will continue to suffer higher
taxes, lower quality of life, higher threat and fear levels, and less actual
safety.
* * *
James R. Edwards,
Jr., a 1998 Lincoln Fellow with the Claremont
Institute, is also an adjunct fellow with the Hudson
Institute and coauthor of The Congressional
Politics of Immigration Reform (1999).Return
to the Fall, 2004 edition of Local Liberty
THE REALITY OF LA RAZA’S LOOTING
OF CA:
Consider Ignacio Mesa
Viera, subject of a recent front-page story in the Sacramento Bee. He came to
the United States illegally in 1979 to work and help his family, as he
explained, but was convicted on a drug offense in 1995. He was deported but
returned to the United States, whereupon he was busted for another drug offense
in 2008. Before his recent deportation, the U.S. government was paying for
Viera’s kidney dialysis, a treatment that can cost more than $60,000 a year. “I
imagine that the reason they don’t want to let me stay in this country,” Viera
told the Bee, “is they don’t want to be paying for this.”
Cedillo and his colleagues need to know that everybody’s
taxes pay for services they and their children “cannot get”—including kidney
dialysis and other expensive medical treatments courtesy of the federal
government. Meantime, as a University of
California report noted last year, tens of thousands of middle-class, taxpaying
legal residents are being squeezed out of an affordable college education even
as the legislature contrives to provide scholarships for the children of
illegal aliens. The lawmakers’ solution is to create yet
another entitlement in the form of a new $1 billion scholarship program for
students whose families earn less than $150,000 a year. Such is life in the
Golden State, even with a DREAM Act in place.
Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American
Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s and the former
editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute.
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