Immigration, Redux

There are new rules in New Jersey when it comes to arresting illegal immigrants.

The state Attorney General issued a directive Tuesday requiring any police officer who arrests someone on felony or drunk driving charges, and thinks the arrestee might be an illegal immigrant, to check the arrestee's immigration status. If it looks like the arrestee is undocumented, the officer will then report it to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The likely outcome is that after the immigrant's sentence is over -- or if they are found innocent -- they will be deported. That's right, it doesn't matter whether or not they are found guilty.

And it's up to the officer to decide who is suspiciously undocumented-looking.

I'll have a story about it in tomorrow's Jersey Journal.

These rules are almost directly the result of all the buzz surrounding the revelation that Jose Carranza, one of the suspects implicated in the deaths of three Newark college students and the near-killing of a fourth on Aug. 4, was not only an illegal immigrant but was also out on bail pending trial after he was charged with the repeated rape of a young girl.

Recidivism among illegal immigrants will be zero, the reasoning goes, if they are deported after their first felonies.

You can read the actual directive from state Attorney General Anne Milgram here.

Let's not talk about real problems: From A Powerful Idea

On my public policy/editorial blog, A Powerful Idea, I just wrote a post on the aftermath of the brutal murders of three college students in a Newark parking lot on Aug. 4.

You should care because over here in New Jersey, people are starting to make their deaths a vehicle for what will likely become draconian and misguided immigration policy. You see, several of the suspected killers were immigrants, and some were not here legally. However, at least one lived in this country since he was nine. A link to a Star-Ledger story profiling the suspects is on my Web site.

That the 25-year-old suspect has lived in this country for 15 years would make him a product of our fucked-up system, not an international one. Yes he is an immigrant, and yes the other suspects are too, some of them illegal. But they grew up here and are a product of our system. Illegal immigrants are not the cause of the problem. Illegal immigration and the circumstances of the poor in America, on the other hand, are. That's the short version and the gist of my blog post.

What I don't say in my blog is that in another Star-Ledger column, columnist Paul Mulshine supports the mayor of Morristown, New Jersey, in his push to make police in the state automatically act as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I know what you're thinking and the answer is yes -- that would mean every beat cop is also suddenly la migra when they want to be.

On the surface, this honestly isn't that bad an idea. Undocumented immigrants here should not be committing violent crime and we should not have to deal with them hurting us.

But headline-grabbing violent crime is thankfully much rarer than the stuff that goes unnoticed -- drug arrests, disorderly persons offenses, the kind of thing that puts you in county lockup for a couple of nights and sticks you with a heavy fine unless you can pay bail and beat the charges with a lawyer. How many people who can't afford to be in this country legally, much less live in a low-crime neighborhood, can do that?

Making police double as immigration cops and increasing the number of deportations might get criminals out of the country. But when did these immigrants who commit crimes become criminals? Was it before they entered the country, or after? And if they came here illegally, was it the necessity for illicit action that made them familiar with criminality?

My job puts me face to face with a lot of people, and some of them live unhappy and impoverished lives. Some people in those conditions smoke weed or do heroin or get drunk in public or yell at each other in public and some of them get caught. Some -- I would guess most -- can't make bail, of course, and so they go to county lockup until their court date. They are eventually released from lockup and return to their lives, poorer for the time wasted not working if they have jobs, the trauma and humiliation of imprisonment, and whatever penalties imposed on them for their behavior.

As a result of their imprisonment, some of the people I meet in those circumstances fear for their jobs, their housing situations, their family stability.

Their incarcerations hurt not only them but anyone who depends on them, and if someone is made even poorer by imprisonment, won't their chances of committing another crime only increase?

So the low-income world is already a precarious one. Throw a questionable residency status on top of that and consider what the consequences of imprisonment are. Sure, people shouldn't be committing crimes in the first place, but is it wise to punish a guy for ruining his own life by giving him a kick in the ass to help him down the road to oblivion?

Crime committed by illegal immigrants is not a matter of "them" doing violence to "us." It is a failure of our social services and our society, just as is all crime. And it is quite likely that our American system of poverty and neglect manufactured the criminality in the first place.

End of story.

I run the A Powerful Idea blog and currently work in media in New Jersey. Fred invited me here some months ago. I am just making a return to blogging and recently restarted A Powerful Idea after a some-month hiatus (losing my entire archive in the process), so my apologies for the belated first post. And, hello.

YearlyKos 2007 Cartoon

I was just at YearlyKos this weekend in Chicago. For those not in the know, (here comes some political snobloggery), YearlyKos is a self-proclaimed speaker on behalf of the American people.

Here's my experience:




Pictures to come, maybe.

To whom it may concern

Stop doing that silly-ass dance. You look ridiculous.

How do you kill a man locked in a room?

A thin man lies half sprawled across a large wooden desk. He gently holds a pen. On the desk there are the man’s glasses, a photo album, and a piece of paper next to a stack of more paper. On the single page there is written:
I was born in 1939 in a small town outside Seattle, Washington. My father w-
The page ends in a long scrawled line.
Behind him, there is a bookcase. On his left there are three long windows each adorned with red velvet drapes and iron bars. To his right, there is a fireplace and above that a massive self portrait. If the man were alive, he would have seen in front of him two of the largest South Bay policemen breaking down his large wooden door. Until that moment, the office had been kept pristine.

“This is the General’s private study. He would come here to be alone. He only had one key made for this room.” The butler took a long pause and looked at the ground.
“Go on.” Detective May scribbled furiously.
“The last time I saw him was just last night, 9 hours ago. He checked the house as he always does… (sigh) as he always did. I was never allowed into the room.”
“Yeah, ok that’s all I need for now. Please wait outside. Thank you.”

May had come across scenes like this before. Usually the police don’t stick around too long for corpses without bullet holes, but this man was a government official. Theses cases always required full reports.
“Damn” he whispered under his breath. His pen had run out. “And now here comes that muscle bound idiot.”
Gregory Brig, Captain of the South Bay Police Department, strolled up to May.
“Looks like that old General finally died. Stupid old man, he started his biography too late!” Brig chuckled to himself.
“You are unbearable” May mumbled
“Shut up May. What did the doctor say about the General?”
May quickly flipped through his notebook. “The doctor said the General died ‘around 8 hours ago of a heart attack or some heart condition.’ He will check in the autopsy, but he is certain it was all ‘natural causes.’ I think he’s wrong”
“Uh-huh” Captain Brig had wandered to the window “It’s been a shitty winter, eh, May?”

May ignored the Captain and patted himself for another pen. Something was still bothering him. He just needed to gather his thoughts. He was about to ask Brig for a pen, but remembered that he was an imbecile cop. “Only imbeciles cops walk around without pens.” he muttered.
“What was that?” Brig had wandered over to the window.
“Oh nothing, Captain” he turned to one of the deputies. “Did you find that key yet? It should be in his left pant pocket.”
The deputy shoved his hand into the Generals pocket. “It’s here sir! Ha, how did you know?”
“The General was left handed. Look where the pen is.” May smiled and quickly went to the desk. “I don’t think he’ll mind. Nice pen.” he mumbled.
May pried the silver pen from the General’s hand. It was probably a gift from another official. The pen was wonderfully engraved with the General’s initials. As he admired the weight and balance of the pen, he clicked it open. He froze.
“Hey lemme see those keys!” The deputy tossed them to May. He inspected them closely and found a small piece of tape attached to the leather flap. He then moved to the corpse and felt the neck. “Hey Brig, we’ve got a murder here!”
“That’s impossible. There’s no way!”
“Just go get that Butler.”
Brig left the room and returned with the Butler. May stepped forward with notebook and pen in hand. He smiled.
“You are real outdoorsmen aren’t you?”
“Uhm…I suppose I was”
“You go fishing a lot?”
“I used to before I worked for the General. I went with…”
May began scribbling in his notebook. “It’s always the Butler” he mumbled.