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.
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.
posted by Nick at 11:13 PM
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