Category: News and Views
I also posted this on Facebook and am genuinely interested in what gets put forward:
I have a question for all who support Arizona's law. My question is as a former Immigration and Naturalization Services employee. If you care to look it over / enlighten feel free. This is not a political question so much as one of practical considerations.
Which piece of data can a law enforcement officer use to determine who is a citizen and who isn't?
I was a translator for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the 1980s during the Reagan Amnesty program for Seasonal Agricultural Workers.
How will local police enforce such a law? What are you or I carrying which identify us as American citizens? And I'm not talking those of you who emigrated from other countries, but those of you who, like me, were born here.
You carry a Social Security card? So do illegal / undocumented folks: that's how they pay federal income tax. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble but ... when I worked at Immigration, the numbers didn't look anything like what some are claiming in terms of nonworking illegals.
Far easier to come here illegally and work than it is to come here illegally and collect benefits.
so we know Social Security Card is out. We all used to tell them so, and send them bac, by the way.
Ok what about your driver's license? Well, although you have to present a birth certificate to get one of these, the license doesn't say anything about citizenship / residency status.
Consequently, anybody who pulls me over, being born in the U.S., I have no green card, I have no nothing, which says, "I Am An American Citizen."
And, if I am tasked with the job of pulling people over / accidentally now responsible if someone slips through the cracks, I'm a local cop, how can I possibly tell?
Would those of you supporting Arizona's law be upset if going forward everyone had to register with a national registry as a citizen?
Some countries do this, in fact, and they actually can tell who is and who isn't a citizen. Since I asked the question, I'll answer it for myself: I have no problem with registering with a federal register showing my birth certificate and having my ID card marked as Citizen. I simply would not be able to leave the house without it, though, not even to walk to the store just in case I end up being a bystander or a witness to an event of some kind. Is this what you all want?
We had very precise parameters in the 1980s: 90 days of work per year for three consecutive years, etc.,
Enforceable, in other words. And, for what it's worth, we intercepted white as well as nonwhite immigrants.
I guess the reason I didn't take this law seriously to begin with was it just looks totally and completely unenforceable.
Laws are enforced not by current trends or preferences, but by data.
Put yourself, if you will, in the enforcer's shoes:
A local cop, local budgets (far less than we had at INS):
Now, it's your watch. How are you going to see that no illegal / undocumented person gets through? If you are responsible to enforce, it is now you're responsibility, your watch, to see that none get through.
As I said, during the 1980s, there were strict parameters. And that was for amnesty, but the same goes for deportation of all types. You have to deport, and you have to report the deported and the reason for the deportation. Otherwise you could have deported somebody one year and accept them as a citizen ten years down the road. So documentation of who gets deported is very very important.
Intercepting without cause generally means there is someplace else where there is cause, and you missed. Perhaps I'm woefully ignorant here, but I haven't seen anyone put forward a solution which will indicate to any law enforcement officer tasked with this who is, and who isn't, a citizen. Legal residents carry green cards. As of yet, we do not. Do you propose we carry citizen cards?
Anyway I've been thinking about this for weeks / making notes and what you have here is my disjointed notes. Maybe some of you all know of a real data-based solution to the enforcement problem. Knowing unequivocally who is as important as the what.
Leo I see where you're coming from on this one as a former INS employee. One of Mr Sponge's friends is a nice guy who learned English & wanted to become an American citizen. He would have been a productive member of society, but he had approval, at least as a temporary resident. He decided to travel in other parts of the U S, and got caught in El Paso of all places without documentation, and, subsequently, deported. Green cards in particular take forever to reach the person whose approved for permanent residence, and I suspect this was a matter of someone having approval without having been sent whatever documentation.
On the other hand, Arizona is a large state with a lot of Mexican and other than Mexican population, some legal, others not. How can someone be a governor of such a state & give residents of border cities like Nogales & Yuma an impression that they just don't care about the matter of the illegals? Now I lived in Phoenix for 10 years, but in these border towns you have to deal with stuff you don't in the capitol, stuff like people trampling through your back yard early in the morning and you know you didn't invite 'em there & illegals robbing & assaulting citizens & legal residents. My mom is retired fedaral employee, & dealt with people convicted of federal crimes, some of them illegals where the end of them serving time involves deportation.
I personally would be willing to carry my American passport or some document saying I am a citizen, or go on a national registry stating that fact. Personally I believe, especially since the country is still in a recession, it is time to stop accepting fewer immigrants, both legal & illegal. We're just past the time period we need a lot of unskilled workers, with immigration comes a diversity of disease, especially from the developing countries, and many are just not adapting to life in a first world nation. I don't know about the Pacific Northwest, but up here in Massachusetts we have everyone from Hepatitis B positive Chinese to HIV positive Haitians to high school drop outs from Muslim majority countries. The world's hot spots for tuberculosis has its immigrants, no fooling almost all the countries on the list have their populations here & tb is higher in immigrant communities in this state. A Latina in the neighborhood by Logan Airport abandonned her newborn, in an alley...this is a very rough & tumble area...and many in this neighborhood are cared for by taxpayer sponsored benefits. The Arizona immigration law at least acknowledges the problems a lot of these people cause and asks for accountability on their part.
I'm not without sentiment, but perhaps it's an engineer's mind: To me a governor 'shows that he cares' as it were, by providing a data-based, structural mechanism to handle this. After all, I may be very aware of a situation I'm responsible to handle, and may very well have strong feelings for the customers in question, but without hard data, basically nobody cares in the long run.
I strongly believe this should be handled federally anyway as it exceeds one jurisdiction's ability to enforce. We don't need territory fights about who's state or whose county or whose other sovereign municipality when dealing with this issue. And yes, I understand that we as well as any nation have to deal with the immigration issue.
However, this coming from the party who is supposed to be the supporters of innovation, then pulling a new-age stunt by saying at least we care, gets them no place. At least not with me.
Someone on Facebook told me 'At least the Tea Partiers are taking their stand!'
To which I responded: Telephone poles can take their stand. Only human beings can innovate, and only civilized human beings do it really well.
There are ways this could be accomplished and I wish we'd done it in the eighties, to be honest, but frankly the same people who want immigration reform would kick their little feet and shake their tiny hinys about a new world order if we required registration on a Federal Register.
If your fingerprints were registered and you were printed at the station, you could have a house fire and still have your status on file.
The responses on Facebook have been sparse, though I've gotten a couple 'yeah you're making sense' from people similar to me.
The huge ginormous astronomical disappointment to me is the group who is supposed to promote innovation apparently can't innovate their way out of a wet paper bag, and then turns and claims the good old hippy trick of 'Oh but at least we care!'
And for anyone thinking it's just a matter of race, I have two names for you:
1980s, the Nazis criminals from World War II who escaped Germany, blended into white society all over, including the U.S.
And there's Walker from the Taliban terrorist training camp, raised a middle-class white boy, and you definitely wouldn't want him returning to the U.S. unencumbered by security.
As to the TB and other medical issues I take your word for it, I'm woefully ignorant, but it seems some of this can be tested for as a precursor. What ails us is a profound disorganization because of territorial disputes. As I explained it to a British friend, the U.S. is more a federation of sovereign entity than an actual union. And if it can be sovereign in the U.S., it is.
We definitely need to handle the situation, but not by a bunch of protesters who in yesteryear would have slept on the Capitol Steps for Civil Rights and this year push like on Facebook: We need to innovate our way out of this without compromising the American way of life.
I support the Arizona law, but I see your points about enforcing it. I'm glad you brought those up, because they make me think.
I also would have no problem being part of some kind of citizens registry. That's actually a good idea. I can't think of any cons to it. But we'd have to find a way to prevent illegals from even finding their way onto that. After all, they can get a social security card and driver's license as it is, which I can't stand, by the way. So how would you even enforce this kind of registration system?
I believe Arizona closed the loophole of drivers licenses for illegals. www.msn.com had an article some weeks ago about the states these folks were going to get drivers licenses in the southwest & northwest.
The Enhanced Driver's License is supposed to assist in compensating for the loophole. The reason for allowing them driver's licenses is so they're driving safer on the roads (they've passed the tests etc.)
The reason they would not be able to fake a registry entry very easily is with what birth certificate? If you're born here, you have a a birth certificate from here and that is used to do all sorts of things. For me recently, to join the Coast Guard.
As to the social security number, as I said, illegals pay a lot in taxes which is in part why the resistance to some levels of enforcement. In the 1980ss out here we had fruit rotting on vines while the amnesty program was getting sorted out. But no, sneaking onto a citizen register would not be easy, because the whole reason for being there is entirely different than getting a driver's license, paying automobile registration, and paying federal and state income taxes.
In other words, a different part of the government, or in the case of DMV, a different government (your local state).
The fact they didn't think this one through is appallingly disappointing, and again, from the party who is supposed to be a proponent of innovation. The Right has thoughtlessly and carelessly given us our new deal, equally thoughtless, equally careless, equally idealistic, just a different ideology. It's bound to be equally or more expensive, because it'll be spread out over local municipalities who lack the resources necessary to do it right.
And for the record, by 'they', I'm not referring to the easily-swayed idealistic masses of sheeple clicking 'like' on Facebook: nobody expects them to innovate.
However I'm referring to the people who drafted this legislation. Immigration is, has been, and always will be a national and not a national issue. Asking the local police to handle it is tantamount to pulling a tripple trailer with a Volkswagen Jetta up a steep hill.
Unfortunately though, while I agree with you that it should not be handled on a state level, the state of arizona was forced into this by a federal government that was unwilling to enforce the constitution it swore to upheld. The president and congress have done nothing to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, even going so far as to say they aren't criminals and offering to grant them amnisty. if the federal government won't hold up its end of the bargain, the states have to.